Hushabye
by Aubretia Lycania
Summary: A terrible accident has rendered Raphael mentally disabled and in the capable hands of Donatello. The meaning of forever is an understanding that comes at an enormous price.
1. Once upon a time

Author: Aubretia Lycania

Description: A terrible accident has rendered Raphael mentally disabled and in the capable hands of Donatello. The meaning of forever is an understanding that comes at an enormous price.

Author's Note: This story is a random threevil bunny I talked out with Tori Angeli in the middle of the night and it's totally coming out of left field. It has no relation to the Trilogy but it's certainly something I think I leaned towards and wanted to explore in greater depth. It follows the continuity of the 2007 and 1989 movies and the movie prequels and picks up quite a bit of random adventures and filler info from NT. And let me just warn anyone NOT familiar with my stuff… I can get dark and intend to do so in this fic. Not for the faint of heart.

Disclaimer: If I owned these turtles, I would not be sitting in this god-awful dirty ass room in the co-op. But such is the life of a college student.

Hushabye

It is a fair assessment to say that a teenager does not comprehend the concept of "forever." When youth takes hold as the conquering force of a life, it is the current moment, the luscious _now_, the seductive present that matters, and matters only. Death, realistic love, marriage, children, growing old, lingering sickness, the rest of one's life—these are not realities unless they occur in the now, and more often than not, they aren't. While they are the stuff of life, these things do not exist in that epoch that is the seven or eight years of teenagerdom. This in-between, this pocket, anachronistic and somehow phantasmagoric, runs as a flitting spectacle, life as it should but can never be. This is life in bloom, life at its best and still, somehow, least realistic. The teenager is everything the rest of the world wishes to be and yet everything that life is not, and cannot exist without the rest of humanity going on as usual, silent longing, silent understanding, and still—somehow—befuddled. It needs to be befuddled by that floating world, losing and gaining year by year, slowly transmogrifying, outside of life, and the image by which it judges itself.

When Donatello accepted the responsibility of his brother—the more or less full-time responsibility of his brother—he was at the tail end of this period and should, by all rights, have ideologically be coming into his own and making those realizations which open the door into later life. He was nineteen, and a hermit—a blossoming scientist with multiple inventions and experiments at work at once, he still not fully grasp, beyond the abstract and meaninglessness of an word in the English language, the concept of "forever."

"This is a spoon, Raph, like I told you yesterday. Spoon. Now you say it."

"S-s-soon."

"You forgot the p-sound, Raph. P like in 'pizza'. You know pizza."

"Piza!"

"Okay, now—spoon. Say spoon."

"Soon."

"Kuh… Raphael! Are you… I _hate_ it when you're difficult on purpose, you know that?"

For a year, Donatello was patient. For a year, Donatello was a saint. For a year, more than 365 days, a nun would have commended his work with his younger brother, while Leonardo and Michelangelo accelerated their ninja training, took on the family's financial burdens, and went on the adventures that once all four of them had undertaken, as unbroken teenagers, whole and strong. He worked to undo the damage that had been done, to re-teach Raphael words and gestures and even an entire personality that constituted his sibling. The more he attempted to teach these gestures, the more he came to see that "Raphael" was nothing but a construct within his mind, and this person—this new thing before him—was not it. The more he attempted to teach these gestures, the more he came to understand that the person he had known was dead.

And so, morning after morning, it was the same futile attempts, losing meaning with each repetition, and he felt himself, slowly, separating from this being, held there only by a thin blood bond and the ties of obligation and duty so familiar to a warrior.

Sitting at the kitchen table, forcing Raphael to grip the spoon, and watching as he attacked his cereal with gusto, like a three-year-old, and observe in disgust as milk dribbled down his chin and he ate with a wide, stupid grin. After a year, Donatello stopped measuring caloric and nutrient intake and let Raphael eat as little or as much as he wanted, so long as he did and was no trouble about it. He stopped structured exercise and just had him play energetic games with Michelangelo for an hour or two, so he stayed healthy. Then, instead of the fruitless attempts at making him read, sat him down before the TV next to Splinter, and let him sit—mindlessly, for hours, while Donnie did experiments, repairs around the lair, and generally had a period of time during which he could pretend that his sibling did not exist, or was—could be—as he hoped—Raphael once again.

Early morning, the whirring of the fans in his computers, particles of dust floating serenely through still air—half awake twilight.

_Raphael opens his eyes and stretches, scratching the back of his neck as he yawns—he flops back down for several minutes, half-asleep. The morning is slow, endless summer, lazier when Raphael awakes, suddenly longer, suddenly lacking rush and hurry. He has awoken, as by miracle—himself again._

But this dream must flit away; it is akin to closing one's eyes while in unpleasant surroundings and doing all one can to imagine that home sits around them—to the point where one hopes, when I open my eyes, for a moment I will have convinced myself so deeply that I was elsewhere that this place shall seem alien to me—that feeling, fleeting, ephemeral, the fairytale of the child mind, that one may transport elsewhere through the mind alone, is the wish Donatello held onto voraciously in these early hours. Between sleeping and awake, he could imagine that all was normal again. That his brother was not a drooling idiot, that both of them were as they once were. Then waking bit him deeply in the back of the mind, and dreams vanished. Time to feed Raphael his cereal.

The realization came to Donatello after the last cat scan he gave his brother, a year after the incident; he sat at his desk, pored over the terrible red and orange blobs that gave him Raphael's death sentence. He flipped back through his medical journal, which charted the course of his experiments and the last year—so formal, so cold, so perfect and objective.

_Dec 12_

_Subject consented._

_Equipment gathering: approx. 65 complete_

_Pending:_

_Chem. (see list)_

_Anesthesia_

_Equip. v. A.—converter, boards, processor, scan_

_Straps, buckles_

_Dec 13_

_Table prepared, double screws, weight capacity and strain tested with subject. Straps straining at fiber level—stronger material needed. Asked A v. phone. Tomorrow._

_Dec 14_

_Table finished and strain tested. Subject showing signs of anxiety over straps, needs reassurance of efficacy of experiment. Prepared presentation of advantages. Chem. Acquired. Read materials and risks of anesthesia._

_Dec 15_

_Preliminary experiment logs_

_Hypothesis: Chemical X v. TCRI created an accelerated evolutionary process within four infant turtles, scientist included, creating advanced processing and physical capacity, opposable thumbs, and greater resistance to temperature changes than standard reptile. Subject (aka Hamato Raphael, Turtle 3 or "T3"), while undergoing evolution, sustained DNA scramble that resulted in abnormal hormonal and chemical imbalances, and further resulting in massive emotional instability and occasional psychosis, periods of memory loss, and heightened aggression. This experiment will attempt to use gene therapy to normalize chemical secretion in the brain._

_Still studying the effects on anesthesia on T3 brain during process. _

Yes, it did indeed seem beautiful, even now—so organized in a chaotic world, so full of potential and promise.

He had this day finished cleaning Raphael off from the morning meal, when Leonardo arrived inexplicably. His smile had turned a great deal gentler over the last year; when Raphael saw him and had enough time to process what he was seeing, he flashed a great, stupid smile, and started clapping. Don sighed.

"Leo—don't get him all excited, please. I still have to get him in the bath."

Leonardo smiled easily, coming close to Raphael in the way Michelangelo was often afraid to do—as though, subconsciously, he thought brain damage was contagious—and rubbed his shoulders. Leo had a way of sliding smoothly in and out of the lair, helping with the day-to-day grind as much as possible—but not to the extent Don thought he should. Raphael seemed like a novelty to their older brother, like babysitting a charming child… though Don could see no charm in the dribbling, tantrum-throwing, bear-hugging behemoth he had to deal with.

"I got it, Don, don't sweat. You take care of the security system—I couldn't make anything of it." He leaned down so he and Raphael were eye level and waited until they had contact before speaking. "Raph, I'm gonna help you with a bath. Is that okay?"

Raphael always understood Leo quicker—or perhaps he just enjoyed Leo's voice better and was more willing to agree—and, after a moment processing, grinned again and clapped.

"Bass! Stikas?"

Leo smiled big. "I'll grab them, okay?"

Donatello folded his arms. "Do you have to, Leo? It's a waste of time to mess with those letters anymore. I've been trying for months."

Leo took no offense, but remained smiling, and Raphael followed his example. "He's been better—he just spells phonetically."

Donatello jerkily picked up the soiled dishes, scowling. "Yeah—which means his memory's shot."

Leo shrugged. "And? He likes them, at least. Makes baths easier."

"That's what you do with a two-year-old," Don mumbled, now rinsing, his back to his siblings. "He's twenty."

Leo's smile did not falter, but his eyes were pitying, lingering on Don. "You're the scientist, not me."

One could simply tell there was something off about Raphael now by the way his face hung—he often had strange, strained expressions, his jaw sticking out or to the side, or ground his teeth and breathed through his mouth as though he were hissing. He often chewed on his tongue, puffed out his cheeks, and gazed off at nothings, as though he were newly discovering the world that he had known for twenty years.

Donnie didn't respond, continuing the dishes, so, patiently, Leo began the process of coaxing Raphael to his feet—which wasn't difficult when a bath lay in the future. Leo often reflected that, as toddlers went, Raphael wasn't bad—he threw very few tantrums, ate happily, played, slept, watched TV silently, and liked baths. Might as well count one's blessings. Leo grabbed the plastic container of colorful foam letters he'd acquired a while back—called "stikas" by Raphael because they could stick to the bathtub and walls after getting wet. Donatello plaintively ignored them in their entire slow progress.

Then things were easy, when the walking part was over. Get the textured mat inside the bathtub so Raphael wouldn't slip when standing or getting in. Raphael sitting cross-legged as the hot water slowly surrounded him—he liked to be in the tub while it half-filled with water, just a low layer that Donnie deemed "safe." Get the no-tears soap, and sit in the tub with him while he splashed happily for the first few minutes. Then Leo broke out the little foam letters, and let them float on the surface, little bobbing, disjointed sounds and thoughts—which, when he allowed himself to contemplate them and remove from the present, made him wonder what his brother's mind must now be like. He gathered a carefully selected handful, took Raphael's digits into his own, and pressed the letters into his palm, until he looked at them.

Raphael's eyes took them in, poking and sorting the letters with one thick finger; his mouth worked on his tongue, almost pensively, while Leo played with other letters, trying not to make it apparent he was watching. Raph made an odd hissing sound, with his front teeth pressed down on his bottom lip: the F sound.

He picked up the F and placed it, gingerly, on the wall. Again, he went to sorting, intent upon his business, and Leo kept spelling and taking down, still smiling.

After a little longer, and some odd growling as though fighting between the R and L sounds, Raphael finally decided on another letter—up went the R, to the left of the F.

He stared at the combination for a great while, seemingly dissatisfied with it. Back at the odd assortment in his hand that Leo had nevertheless thought through rather carefully. Squinting and with a strained expression, he picked out the A, and placed it between the R and the F.

R-A-F.

He sat back admiring his handiwork, and Leo looked, as though for the first time, beaming.

"R-A-F—your name, Raph! Looks good!"

Raphael clapped then, after a moment, lifted his hand stiffly. Leo reached out and gently high-fived it, making Raphael laugh his odd, hitching new gargle, so unlike his old, deep, barrel-chested throaty laugh, but wholly pure and belonging to this new person. It was an innocent laugh, not conscious of itself.

Leo picked out another handful, and pressed them into Raph's palm again. It was faster this time; Raphael liked this word. He spelled it every time, and no matter Don's inducements, would never spell it right.

R-I-O.

Leonardo had laughed the first time. He loved it because _Rio_ was the Japanese phonetic spelling of his name, as it would be in katakana.

Right now Leo gazed at it, while Raphael grinned unashamedly, tapping Leo with a great green paw.

"Leo, dat's y-yo name!" He had a strange voice now, as though he had a cold, somehow choked, or speaking around a bit of cotton.

It was times like these when Leo's smile almost faltered, when realizations struck him—when affection gripped his heart, an overpoweringly protective feeling beaming out of him in waves. He reached out, grasped his brother's shoulder, and waited for his eyes to swing over and meet his.

"You know I love you, right?"

He always asked questions, always gave Raphael a chance to answer. He received a blank look for a moment, processing behind the eyes—many blinks—and then, like the morning sun after the longest night of winter—that smile, so unrestrained and white and happily given, never begrudging, never scant or stingy or given subtleties. It was wide, frank and open. Raphael grinned in this way for quite a while, before, as in a sudden thought or reminder of their presence, he looked again at the little pile of foam numbers and letters in his hand. He sorted with a finger for a thoughtful moment, before deciding upon a green symbol.

He stuck it up on the wall, a little 2.

2.

Two.

Too.

_I love you too._


	2. Rockabye

This day, when he began to understand "forever," Don sat before his journals, poring over him, looking for some place he'd gone wrong, some hiccup, that could give him a way to reverse this. But it was true—this was no cartoon, and there was no "reverse" switch on the bottom of the handheld device that would turn his brother's personality back to itself. He knew that the images in his hands showed massive areas of permanent damage—but hell, he'd been a gladiator for a dinosaur empire, had traveled to a competition between separate universes, had been summoned by the most advanced race in the galaxy, had seen the future, had touched the most amazing technology, had learned from the greatest ninja ever born at the place of their council, had saved the world countless times—yet here he was, Hamato Donatello, friendless in a sewer with limited supplies at his fingertips, having no idea who to call or who to turn to, with something so important he couldn't save it. Damaging the brain was irremediable; the nerve cells had died, and even should he replace them, the amazing neural map that Raphael's mind had been building since infancy, that made up who is was, would be gone—there was no lasting trace of what had been damaged. On some level Don knew he could indeed contact the Utroms or Usagi, for science or magic, and both of them would make his brother functional again—but neither could make him _Raphael_ again, any more than they could raise people from the dead. They could perhaps heal the brain, but he would never be who he was. The Raphael he'd known was now disappeared into some great gaping maw in the universe, irretrievable, but by a miracle, that Don kept hoping he could bring about.

The looming impossibility of that filled Donatello with fear.

It seemed, indeed, impossible that his tough brother Raphael, with so much will and so much personality, could have been wound up in a microscopic web of such terrible delicacy, that a breath could destroy it. It seemed impossible that his good intentions could carry, like a wayward breeze, his sibling's life so far off course, toward lost islands where only the gods could save him.

It seemed, yes, impossible, that time must go forward, and forward only, and that when he asked Renet to send him back in time, her response could only be that he would only try to fix the experiment in ways that would cause more damage, creating infinite futures with Raphael dead, and make the entire event happen all over again. And for that—for his own impossibility—Donatello despised this life, trapped with his damaged younger brother, with the ghost of who he once was, the walking reminder of his grandest—perhaps his last—failure. The reality was that Raphael wasn't the only element who needed to alter and be fixed; Don couldn't save the situation by any means until he changed himself. And he was not yet aware how he had to do that.

The truth of having younger siblings like Michelangelo and Raphael was accepting their innate vulnerability as the element that made them the _otouto_, little brothers. Both were amazing warriors and had been, at nineteen, maturing nicely—yet always a step behind Don and Leo, always reckless and unthinking, unstable emotionally on Raphael's end and devoid of focus on Mikey's. Yet it was Don's way to look for solutions. Now, of course, Raphael was not unstable. He was the same everyday, for the most part. He never ran away to the surface, never disobeyed Master Splinter, never dodged ahead in battle or put his life in danger, was never captured, beat up, or bound—and Donatello wished he would do all of these things again, if it would relieve him of his burden.

"Hey, Don, whatcha doin'?"

Don nearly flew out of his seat; he whirled in his desk chair, away from brain images, to see Michelangelo.

"How'd you manage to sneak up on me?" he asked, rather sourly.

Mikey chuckled; he still had a gleam about him of adrenaline, some fight he and Leo had just returned from, or runs, or practice—or anything _out_ of the den, really, useful and energetic that made one's blood sing.

"You're outta practice these days, brother 'o mine. It's kinda easy. So…" he craned his neck, looking rather obviously at the pile of papers and negatives Don had on his workspace. "…got a solution all worked out? Raph gonna be, like… Raph again?"

Donatello scowled. It was not enough that Mikey and Leo got to have lives and flaunt them every time they came home, no. Mikey had to endlessly prattle on about this supposed "solution" Donnie was always just on the brink of discovering. But when irritation, always close to the surface now with Raphael often singing or muttering or getting into something in the background, Don had to be fair.

Mikey had no wherewithal to accept his brother's transformation, nor did he have the scientific knowledge to understand why he should. He could go the rest of his life believing Don would fix his mistake if no one bothered to explain to him—and that hope, that sheer blightless faith, tortured Donatello worse than watching Raphael dribble milk every morning down his chin.

Don smiled weakly. "Working on it. I feel like I've seen this stuff so many times that I'm not really seeing it anymore."

Mike folded his arms. "Yeah, dude, that's what drawings are like. I could have this huge perspective problem and never see it 'till I turn the picture upside down or sleep on it. Maybe you should do that."

Perspective problem. This entire issue was one huge perspective problem. The trouble with Splinter's perspective, who enjoyed sitting and watching his stories with Raphael beside him, newly a toddler once more, so accepting—and Leonardo's, who had already seemed to forget the old Raph, because this one was so much easier to deal with—one would think they believed all this a _good thing_. It made Donatello sick.

And all of them so trusting. After all, he was Donatello. He would figure it out, like the superbrain whiz-kid he'd always been, and save the day. Yay, end of episode.

"I've been sleeping on it every night for a year, and no better ideas."

"Well, dude," Mikey started, as though hesitant, "we got lots a' options open to us, ya know. I bet the utroms got lots of advice on how you could do this—or maybe they have a machine that could do it in like, ten seconds! And Usagi has friends in his world… I mean, you might not like all that magic stuff, but it's worth a whirl! And, like—Renet's an option if we got no others—I mean, I bet she'll put us right back before the experiment, and you can just unplug the equipment, and _voila_. We got Raph back again, no harm, no foul."

Don sighed. "First of all, the utroms work within the same boundaries of science as myself. You cannot revive dead matter, no matter how advanced your medical technology—it's the Rosetta's Stone and the Pandora's Box of all scientific discovery, and they haven't found it anymore than humans have; I know that because I've spoken to their scientists at length already, over the last four years. Secondly, the rules of magic in Usagi's world also prohibit bringing the dead back to life, according to a few books he was kind enough to send me. I also saw this once when a stork-man had kidney failure, and asked a priest to heal him—but the kidney had died, the cells were done for, and the priest had to fashion a new one with various parts. Magic has rules, alchemical, and these rules are more scientific than you might think. Any attempts within their science to bring the dead back have resulted with as much failure as for people without magic. And thirdly—well, had Renet been able to do something about this—had it been an event that shouldn't have happened and would alter the entire timeline—then she would have offered the moment something went wrong. The fact that we've heard nothing, that Master Splinter is at peace with it after contacting the council and the Ancient One… it means that, for the powers that be or whatever, this was meant to happen, and no one is going to interfere on Raphael's behalf. And after all that, I _still_ asked her, and got a negative. I've already barked up that tree—I'm sure she'd love to help us, but she sees the big picture and apparently—because of me—it wouldn't work."

Mikey struggled for a moment, taking all this in. "But… like… they brought the Shredder back, right?"

Don stared levelly at his brother for a few long moments; this house seemed to have quite a lot of that going on—long stares, moments of incomprehension—all here was a ballet of confusion. "Yes—and that worked out well for them, don't you think?"

Mike blinked a few times, as though ashamed. He gazed out at the couch area, where Raphael sat on the couch cross-legged, cocking his head to the side as he watched the news with their father, and sometimes pointing and making almost incoherent comments to Splinter, who sat smiling in his chair. There was a peace to this image that Donatello could never be part of—he could never accept this as the end, as the last stepping stone—and did not feel he would be welcome to the peace either. He had to find solutions, because this was his fault, because now he was the only one who could.

He knew that's what Raphael—the _real_ Raphael—would have wanted.

Sometime later, Mikey supplanted Master Splinter at the couch—this was, after all, his day off—and began watching CNN. This was a strange and relatively new habit of his. He kept books full of newspaper clippings, took an interest in maps, if not graphs, and took a new, almost unrivaled and systematic approach to crime in the city. It was his one consuming distraction, leaving video games, comic books, and even on occasion his art, to accumulate dust in old corners.

Donnie was still poring over his journals, and Splinter was seeing that Raphael ate lunch—Spagetti-Os with numbers and letters. All those disjointed sounds and symbols made Donnie's mind roar—a cascade of confusion that his brother sorted through each day, looking for some combination he might remember, some that made sense, after a life of the New York crossword puzzle, reading American crime novels, and sifting through the newspaper. Bitterness would clench Don's heart then, and resentment—letters, words, numbers—so easy for himself, making up this twisted dossier that documented the end of his brother's proper life, that could no longer belong to Raphael.

He knew everyone was giving him a break from his responsibility in hopes that he might have a break-through.

And that was precisely what Donatello was having.

_Donatello paused, seeing his brother's carapace to him, staring down into the whirlpools and greenish cascading waterfalls of the sewer junction—at last, he gathered his courage together and treaded over to him, sitting down and watching the water himself._

"_So… you understand what I intend to do, don't you?"_

_A moment of pregnant silence, and Raphael spoke. "You wanna make my brain calm down. Right? So I'll stop having blackouts and stuff."_

_Don sighed, only half in relief. "Yeah, something like that. I want to get at the heart of the problem—I really do feel that it's a simple chemical imbalance. And I don't want you to be on meds for the rest of your life. That's not a solution I think you could stay with."_

"_Look, Don—I don't wanna be like this anymore. I wanna… I dunno. I used to find it kinda exhilarating, the way I am. Run ahead without thinking, barely escape death. Kinda fun, when you're fifteen. Now I'm just… tired. The blackouts are worse. It's either hot or cold, almost all the time. I mean… I'd sometimes rather die than be such a freakin' burden on my own family. You guys always worrying about me."_

_Don clasped his shoulder. "So we'll do it. I'll make it happen."_

_Raph finally looked him in the eye, almost amused, his gaze intelligent. "Yeah. I'm in. Trust ya, bro."_

_Jan 4_

_Raphael still not awake. Conducted brain scans today with Leo's help. Michelangelo uncooperative. I think there's been an error. Checking calculations._

_And the Hell, Raphael's arms struggling against his bonds, his nerves in upheaval—move it away from his motor regions, whatever you do—_

_I need help, this isn't right, how do I get out of this—stay calm, stay calm, push forward. _

Mikey was deeply involved with CNN, when he heard a presence behind him, shuffling, and turned.

He found Raphael standing behind the couch, chewing in his index finger, still staring at the screen, as though enraptured. After a time, he pointed at it.

"Waer da game?"

It wasn't the first time.

Mikey didn't answer him, but turned away and continued watching the news, ignoring his brother with all his might, disturbed as ever by that blank look, those strange expressions, those empty eyes. He frowned, a niggling worry upon his heart. Those eyes. The changed voice.

And the expectation. He hadn't played video games since Raph had disappeared.

He could feel the presence, still there; the worry wouldn't vanish, no matter how he tried to starve it of notice. He turned back; Raphael pointed at the screen again.

"No g-g-game, Maikay. Waer da pin-pin-boom-boom g-g-go?"

Mike swallowed. "Um… broken. I broke it, Raph." A lie. Maybe Raphael would notice—he used to always know and call him on his bullshit.

Raphael stared at him for a long while; perhaps processing what had been said, or what he was going to say.

"Ah-kay." And slowly tottered off, as though losing interest.

Pages of emptiness, while Donatello and his brothers had waited, in silence, for Raphael to slip out of his coma. But silence was not the right word. Michelangelo had not been silent; he'd sat next to Raphael jabbering away for hours, hoping that his brother would hear his voice and fight towards it, back towards light and life and the people who loved him. And, with time, he did. But when he awoke, he barely recognized his family—and the feeling was mutual.

Pages of no news, blank sheets in Don's journal, because he couldn't bear to fill in the predestined spaces for each of those days, because each was as empty as the last. No news. No change. No hope. Nothing to tell his family, because this wasn't a hospital, and he could barely jury-rig together the technology to keep his brother alive. But he'd gotten Raphael in this mess, and he determined, that when Raph woke up, he would be off, scot-free, no harm no foul, get out of jail free. But of course, life seldom works out that way.

And who was he, Hamato Donatello, masquerading as a lab coated doctor in this theatre troupe he called a family in this underground living stage, playing scientist with his brother's life? It was then that he understood—the time of games is done with, there is no calling time-out or pause; this is real, and no one gets an extra man, no one gets a reset, no game over let's try again—his brother awoke, and could no longer speak. His vision had been impaired for several weeks; when it returned, Raphael gazed at his hands as though he had never seen anything like them before. He relearned words, slow and slurred, the most important first.

"_Laaeeo."_

"_Maikay."_

"_Dah."_

"_Dohnay."_

And that is when Donatello began to grasp it, looking over the past year while Raphael stood stupidly, watching Michelangelo at the TV, with the news, this new Mike playing out, and unable to see how the change had been wrought—this was real. This was staying—this was a being of permanence, of immortality, that would haunt him, all his life long. There is no reset button, no reversal. All is set in the mortar of fate, to mould his life forever forward. Forever.

Forever.

"_Aul MahDaunad haad a fahm, ee-yo-ai-yoh!"_

"_Alright… great, Raphael."_

Of course, Donatello did not wake up one day and begin to do it. The seeds had been there since long before he truly understood that his brother would never get better. At first, he really just felt a twinge of resentment. Truly, the feeling was toward himself. But after an hour of attempting to re-teach Raphael a necessary word and getting nowhere, it had not been uncommon, even during the first few months, for Don to loose his patience and perhaps hold Raphael's arm too tightly without realizing it. He was used to a strong Raphael, the brother who could pick him up as youths and toss him into the air if he really felt like it—and abnormally strong grip shouldn't hurt him. If it did, then that was the fault of this new creature, this hideous imposter with its strange, alarming, unrecognizable gestures and faces.

Then Raphael would comply with him, and for a moment, it seemed things were easier… but perhaps this was just the relief of emotions finding release.

"_Auld MakDawnad haad a faahm, eei-yo-ee-yo-eeei!"_

"_Yeah... little quieter, okay, Raphael?"_

But the second year certainly saw a shift, in steady gradations. Don began to write again, in the increasingly longer periods that he sat Raphael before the TV, with Splinter or without. At a loss, he would turn on cartoons, and let his mindless brother stare for hours while he scribbled, while a sick and weakening Splinter rested, while Leo and Mikey trained, worked, did repairs, grocery-shopped, while the den was silent of all but strange, childish cartoonish sounds… as in mockery of his new brother.

_I know I'm failing in my duty, but I have already failed. My job was to fix him, and I cannot. I can't watch Mikey's hopeful face, or listen to him ask "Any breakthroughs?" for another day. _

_And Leo—who the hell does he think he is? He thinks he's being helpful, but all he does is waste his energy and raise the thing's hopes. It's a disrespect to Raphael, treating this behemoth like it's him. If I were to ask Raph right now—if you had to live like this, a burden on your—no, he's not a burden. This is my fault. We have to take care of him, that's the end of the story. And who knows, I may find a way out someday. There must be something of the old Raph, locked up inside this confused muddle._

_I wish I could take that brain apart, pick the damaged pieces out, and find my brother, as though he were in a cage in the hypothalamus, screaming at me to let him out._

And closing his eyes to block out the inked-in proof of all those neural signals that composed his own sense of self, so fragile and so meaningless, laid out, thread-bare, skeletal, naked trees, upon a stark winter white page. Shame.

Shame turned razor teeth upon itself, and birthed a brood of new resentment. He wasn't done yet. Pen in hand once again.

Splinter found the first bruise on his son during their daily constitutional, exercise and play in the dojo, then lunch before General Hospital, while Donatello was on a rare outing to find parts and supplies. The old rat made a grab for Raphael's arm as he reached innocently for the hot stove and saw there, in the inner flesh of the elbow, a flush of purple and blue beneath the green, three oblong shapes and a mesh of light bruising fading off around the curve of the bone. It did not have the look of a wound made entirely fresh—it had healed for at least two days while escaping his father's notice. And while Splinter could not imagine how Donatello could look over Raphael in his daily check-ups without having seen them, there would have been no reason for Splinter to have been informed—and yet, niggling at him—the shape of these bruises. Like the pads of fingers, sunk deep into the softer flesh of his vulnerable son.

He touched Raphael's cheek for a moment while his ward looked off into a reality that Splinter couldn't see, that rested between cognition and oblivion. This time, he decided not to breach the subject with Donatello, assuming his genius son was already aware, or would be so upon the next day's examination. To say that Splinter was rather reliant on the trust he placed in the medical caretaker of their family would not be a stretch of the truth; he needed to believe that Donatello was together, patient, and accepting of whatever hopeful or dire medical truth lay in the body of his damaged son. So he finished preparing lunch and sat with Raphael at the table, patiently assisting, allowing his son to play with his alphabet noodles and spell out words.

R-A-F-H.

L-I-O.

D-A-H.


	3. If that mockingbird won't sing

_Forever._

_No matter what I teach him—no matter how it seems he's growing—he'll always have the damage, he'll never advance beyond the capabilities of a toddler. Endless disappointment that my brothers will never understand, my father fading in the belief that some day, this will progress just one step further, one step better, one step beyond this wasteland, this rut, in which my brother will spend the rest of his natural life. He is my brother, this thing, in the flesh mask of the face I once grew up with, distorting it and twisting around beneath, as in a battle. It is called Raphael, but it will never again be Raph. Leo believes in souls—I have known all this time the truth, that our selves are nothing but electronic constructs existing in molecular sandcastles, ready to topple at the slightest breath. _

_And oh god, or whatever is out there—we never said enough to each other. I know his favorite food was cereal, he loved lifting weights, getting in fights, reading crime novels, having an occasional beer, watching cheesy forensic files shows on late night TV and Cops and…I mean, if I had to give his eulogy tomorrow, what the hell would I say? He knew all the words to the Cops theme song? He could sing Shaft and do all the voices? He loved Cheerios? What a pathetic life… some wooden marker in the sewers, marking someone the rest of the world will never know existed, and all I can say about him—his BROTHER—was that he loved Cheerios. And who do I hate? Who do I blame for that? I can only blame myself for being the cause, for losing the time, for wiling it away, for being the reason I have no more, because he's gone, and he's not—that person I call Raph—he—_

_I am caught in a web of contradictions. My self has been based upon my beliefs; my beliefs have been based in science. To accept Leo's paradigm of souls and meaning, I must sacrifice the roots of my own self in order to continue believing that a core self still rests, trapped, deep inside this Raphael mannequin—I must lose my self if his is to continue existing. If not, I must then accept the possibility that my brother is dead, and that I am alive, carrying his carcass on my back until it finally rots to weightless nothingness, until the burden vanishes into mulch and bacterium, seeping into my pores and infesting me with sickness, and I rot as well._

_Either my brother is dead, or this new creature must die in order to release him into eternal existence, rebirth, or whatever else lies beyond. Either way, his brain is the barrier—it will never allow him to express who he once was._

_Either way, there is death. And I am the only member of my family to understand this._

"_Ald Makdawnad had fahm, eeeh-ai-yoh, eeeh-ai-yoh"—_

"_Raphael, keep it down."_

If his brother was dead or trapped by the existence of this new creature, it became easier and easier not to see it as a person. Keep the beast calm; as long as it didn't cry, throw tantrums, wet itself, all was well. Don would approach to take Raphael's blood pressure while in front of the TV; it stood immediately, as in excitement, leaning in to hug, a small line of drool glistening on its chin—so easy, reach out a hand, firm, cold and calm, push it away and down—then that obtuse, boor-like strength, resisting mindlessly, to stand again, as though pushed by some demon, animal instinct to plague him, and a harder push, making the creature's giant head on thinning shoulders wobble, eyes stare out from deepening hollows made dark by relative inactivity. Gradually shame lessened its clawing grip on Don's chest, so slowly he barely noticed its passing.

"Don—c-cen I hab da—da—t-t-t"—

"Yes, you can watch the cartoons."

"T-t-t"—

"_Ald Makdawnald had a faaahm, EE-AI-EE-AI-YOH!"_

"_Raphael, quiet down, I said."_

It was so easy, after all. Raphael not grasping that it was bath time or lunchtime or bedtime—and it wasn't that Don wanted to hurt his brother, he just wanted him to _get_ there and he wouldn't—and a small push, or a heavy push, and he'd be moving.

A month after this, and perhaps standing in a doorway, as though forgetting for what purpose, Don would administer another push—always a second of incomprehension before the expression would seem to forget, and smile.

"Don—cen I wash da"—

"I'll turn on the cartoons."

"_Auld MakDawndald had a faaahm, ee-ai-eee-ai"—_

"_Raphael, that's enough please!"_

A couple months, and the pushes began to grow associated with an action not happening at the immediate moment, which he rationally knew was wrong, because Raphael would never know what it was he had _done_—a punishment that Donatello would not necessarily think about; it was as though some massive energy were coiling tighter and tighter inside his body and in short spurts, like static, it would jolt out, a push as he passed Raphael sitting at the table, a slight elbow passing him into a room at a faster rate—always so busy, always doing something, as though trying to deliberately contrast with this brain dead lump, this walking corpse, the zombie that haunted their home.

"Don—c-c"—

"Cartoons, yes."

"C-caa"—

"I know."

"_AULD MAKDAWNALD HAD A FAAAHM, EE-AI-EE-YOH-AI"—_

"_I know you're not deaf, Raphael! I said ENOUGH!"_

It was not the furthest leap, then, after all this slow coiling, when, six months after his realization, he noticed a plastic cup with distracted chew marks, and admonished the creature; a day later, he caught him in the act, gnawing away while staring wide-eyed, with those gaping, guileless maws of pupils receiving the information as into a deadening chamber, dulling the sound. Nothingness. A kind of helpless rage, a blind resentment flared inside Donatello, sending electricity itching down taut muscles, and he stood, as upon the very edge of a precipice.

"_AULD MAKDAAAWNALD HAD FAAAHM, EEE-AI-EEE"—_

"_SHUT UP!"_

Then it seemed to notice him there, at last, and—with an astounding, teasing look of _knowing _in its eyes, a tantalizing flicker of the once-Raphael as though there to torture him to distraction—lowered the cup from its gnashing mouth.

Donatello heard the snapping inside his brain, that precluded, by a hair's breadth of a second, every ounce of energy in his body flooding through him in one lightning-quick strike, out through his right leg, in a flailing, artless, harmful kick.

It—Raphael—he--howled, but Donatello closed his ears; he picked up the cup, and threw it, deftly, into the garbage bin. Then he forced their eyes to connect, his own light brown, steady and flaringly intense, searching for a bottom to that vacuum of a well inside his brother.

He stared. The eyes, so close, lost the meaning he had given for too long. They were light brown, much like his own, just a shade deeper in amber—wide and scared, like his brother's as a child. He had gone so long without seeing that face in fright, because Raphael was never scared… but this one was. The eyes of a frightened child, looking back at him, and his stomach tensed, filled with acid, twisted inside of him, a half sick, half empty feeling, with nothing to fill it again, except guilt. He found he was afraid to humiliate himself before this child, and attempted to hold his resolve—whatever that resolve was. Why had he kicked him? A cup. A song. His eyes. Fuck.

Try to give it all meaning.

"Won't do _that_ again now, will you?"

_I'm willing to give this idea a stone's throw—and why, I keep asking myself? Because I saw it there, like a beacon, like a message—Raph telling me he's stuck in there somewhere, like he gets it. All I have to do is push this thing around him back a little—I can't let it take over, I can't let him be lost, I saw him there at the bottom of the well, and I'll be the hand that pulls him up. I have to give him a chance—to tell me the full message, to tell me what he really wants me to do, how I should proceed. I played God with his life once already—I'll heed his last request now, once I have it, no matter the consequences. I must give him a chance._

Don had been fortunate enough to kick Raphael in the plastron—there was no bruise this time for his father or brothers to notice. Tantrums grew more frequent, though they would calm should Leo enter the room—and both Splinter and, in appearance, Don, assumed that these tantrums were the result of Raphael's wish to see his eldest brother more often. Don, however, thoughtfully pointed out that a change to the normal, comfortable routine of Raphael's day would only cause more mental instability and tantrums. As with a toddler, he would have phases of this kind and all they could do was ride the wave out, with patience and forbearance. Perhaps he alone truly understood the impossibility of this, over the endless march of years to come, never a sign of improvement, the same cycles over and over, until the spiral reached its downward fruition.

It was shortly after this that the first event happened that reached Leonardo's notice. Splinter was early a-bed, Mike remained out, working on the security systems (these taking him a bit longer than it had once taken Don to maintenance), and while Don was putting Raphael to bed, Leo remained in the dojo in a session of mandated meditation.

As Donatello approached Raphael's railed bedside to turn on the night lantern, the creature held aloft a thin cardboard storybook, at first making only quiet insistent noises. Don shook his head.

"Not tonight. Time for sleep. You're getting spoiled with all this reading to you, after all the words you've supposedly relearned. You should be able to read that one yourself now." He spoke in a skeptical voice—that which he would have once used on Raph, to call him out on his deceptions, to get a rise out of him.

If he understood him, Raph gave no inkling either way, but instead held the book up more determinedly. "R-raaaed, plaise."

Don folded his arms, almost playfully. "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you. There's a raid? Where?"

Once upon a time Raphael would have punched him for this remark, or returned on cue with some equally biting quip, right on par with his nasty witticisms. As in frustration, the creature bashed the book down on the metal rails surrounded his bed—protection and prison, padded from within like a psych ward. Once begun, he accelerated, bashing the book harder and harder with a twisted look of incomprehensible rage, gnashing his flat teeth.

"Raaed, raaed! Want raaed! Don, want raaed! No, no, no, no_ no no no NO_!"

Donatello's playfulness evaporated into a strange, stinging feeling of spite and disgust, surveying the creature he called his brother, for several minutes of this terrible-twos tirade. Remembering himself and the people whom Raphael might soon disturb as the voice began to elevate, Don stepped forward and took a hold of the book with both hands, locking their gazes. Stay resolved. Don't give in to a tantrum.

"Calm down—I'm not going to read to you and that's final."

The creature's strength surprised him on this occasion in particular; so different from his own, which was still locked deep within well-toned muscles, this was the strength of a strange desperation, the will of rigor mortis to retain a treasure even in death—and there, he caught it again, that glimmer, down in the thing's inhumane rage, of his younger brother, lingering at the corner of its being, almost tactile, so close he could grab a hold of it and keep it in the palm of his hands, a beating heart—

"I said _stop it_!"

—Before Don knew it, he had the creature's arm twisted to the side as in some failed attempt to latch onto something within Raphael that had long flown—in the creature's shock and pain, Don suddenly had the cardboard book in hand, and felt the dull smack as it struck across his brother's face. His heart rate fluttered—exhilarated, before falling from a curious high, craving more in a distant hum in the back of his mind—then the curve downwards, a tingle of sobriety, a flash of that face—_Raph_'s face, in pain, his younger brother, whom he had hit and surprised and harmed—and a tendril of horror, more pure than any he had known since Raphael had become this way, snaked into his heart.

But the child wasn't willing to throw in the towel yet—still well within the limits of a good tantrum, it heedlessly turned the other cheek and continued the struggle, the book falling to the floor with a clatter, while they wrestled arm strength one against the other. Amidst the fray, Don attempted to reclaim his authority.

"Raphael—that's enough—_damn it_, you're really getting on my last nerve, now _lay down and go to SLEEP_!"

"Donatello. What in the name of Amida is going on in here?" came another voice, serving to sober Don like a bath of ice water, and calm Raphael in a sudden, almost complete personality 180, turning with a smile to the door.

"Yay, L-Leo raaed!"

Leonardo stood leaning against the doorframe, surveying the scene with not a little worry and a trace of anger on his young features. At Raphael's enthusiastic greeting, he invited himself onto the scene looking about with a surveying eye, taking in clues, building a greater picture. At last those eyes took in the darkening mark on Raphael's left cheek, and the book upon the floor, and Donatello's heaving diaphragm.

"Well?"

Don showed not a trace of fear. "I was trying to get him to calm down before he hurt himself worse—started bashing the book around all over the place. He's stronger than he looks." Each point true—a good explanation, with tidily excluded his own involvement in the mark on Raphael's slobbering face—the face which Leo seemed to hearken so much joy from. Donatello had begun to suppose that this must be a great entertainment for their oldest brother; no more argumentative, destructive, rebellious, talking-back Raph—just a sweet, adoring, worshipping little brother who thought Leo was the greatest thing since Wile E. Coyote and the Doodle-Bops.

Leo came in further, effectively pushing Don away from the bed; he leaned down and picked up the fallen book wordlessly. Donatello sighed in exasperation.

"Leo, don't even think about it—you realize you'll just teach him that all he has to do is throw a tantrum and he'll get what he wants? Even worse, that he can undermine me by going to you?"

Leo remained silent, checking over the spot on Raphael's cheek, then running a hand speculatively down one arm.

"Hey, Raph—I need you to get under the covers, all right? Sleep sound good?"

Raphael had already begun to obey, but not without hopeful eyes.

"A-affa raaed?"

Leo gazed at the book for a moment. "How about just half tonight? You spent a long time past your bedtime fighting with Donnie."

Raphael seemed to accept this as a reasonable compromise, and laid his head down on his pillow. Leo pulled up the chair to the bedside, opening the thick cardboard pages; after a moment surveying enraged, Don swept out of the room, to wait just outside the door.

Every slow, pedantic, syrupy sweet syllable out of Leo's mouth that he could hear through the door—each word of that ridiculous, lying children's book—made waves of nausea hit Don from the temples inward. He closed his eyes—

_He had only realized what Raphael had liked to read after he was in a coma; in a kind of lost, fitful trance, Don had wandered into Raphael's room and, going perhaps where he might be more comfortable, sat down beside the low bookshelf. For a moment he sat, seeing without reading, dumb and blank—then the titles began to strike him._

The Client_, by John Grisham_

Jurassic Park_, by Michael Crichton_

To Kill a Mockingbird_, by Harper Lee_

The Juror_, by John Grisham_

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_, by Phillip K. Dick_

"Minority Report" and Other Short Stories_, by Phillip K. Dick_

The Talented Mr. Ripley_, by Patricia Highsmith_

Double Indemnity, _by James M. Cain…_

_And on went the list, crime dramas and mysteries, the literature of murder and science fiction, police forensics, all that Don supposed Raphael __would__ like, though he'd never really thought about it before._

_A world of opportunities lost, Don had realized, because they'd never taken the time to look past each other's cartoon extremes, to look past the stereotypes they'd given each other under the guise of fulfilling some kind of niche. Don was the smart one, and Raph was the strong one. It occurred to neither of them to challenge this, despite Donatello's superior range and creativity in battle, despite Raphael's quick-witted street-wise intelligence and easily trained handiness. They were brawn and brain, and had nothing to say to one another. It pained Don then, more than anything—that more than half the books on Raphael's shelf he had read himself. It made him wonder what else he had missed about his brother—what else he may never get to ask him._

Children's books. The words stung like African bees on his eardrums. He hated every linguistic moment, every breath, the creature's enjoyment, torturing the soul buried inside, who knew about the intrinsically devious wonders of Mr. Ripley, who knew the many cinematic errors in the film version of _Jurassic Park_ from the book, who had pondered the mystery of the hole in the tree and the many treasures there in _To Kill A Mockingbird_, and dear all that was holy, all that he had missed, all that lay trapped inside that beast, waiting to spill out.

It wasn't such a bad thing after all—he was only trying to find his brother.

At length, the room had gone silent, until Don strained his ears; almost so low as to be rendered inaudible, he could hear an odd, almost gravely humming. After a time, he could place lyrics to the melody.

_Hushaby baby don't you cry…_

So ironic, Don realized—the one lullaby with a mockingbird in it.


	4. Along came a spider

Finally the click of the light switch, the door shutting deftly behind him, and Leo was standing there, his eyes discerning and, unlike Don's predictions, filled less with anger and more with concern. Donatello was silent, waiting for his brother's first word.

"Don—there's no point in pretending I don't know. This has been tough on you... Because it's not gonna get any better. Is it?"

Donnie was torn between telling Leo, in no uncertain terms, to mind those things he understood, and just flat-out screaming; he did neither.

"No. It might even get worse."

If Leo was surprised, he did not allow the emotion to flicker over his face for an instant. He made as to say something, then thought better of it; he stood silent for several moments, before breaching the barrier once more.

"This is tough because you don't know what it is Raph would've wanted you to do in this situation. He never bothered to understand what it was you planned on doing to him—he put the burden on you when he trusted in you blindly. He was no fool then, Don; he could've easily understood the risks if he'd tried. Neither of you ever tried."

Don's voice came out surprisingly harsh. "Don't talk about him that way—this was _my_ mistake, Leo."

Leo would have scoffed if the situation were lighter. "I won't act like he's some dead venerated ancestor who's passed on, Donnie. That's the person that he was. He took pride in making people think he didn't care; he seemed to think he had to hide the fact that he was intelligent. He let other people think for him so he could run through life without giving a damn. He ran headlong into this and now he's paying the price. And he knows that—I can tell. No matter how limited his abilities are now, he enjoys every bit of life he can get his hands on, takes in every piece of information he can possibly remember. And he's trying to show us that, but he doesn't know how to communicate it."

"And how do you know all this?" Don hadn't meant to sound so spiteful, but it squeezed out anyways, hot and vicious.

Leo shook his head. "I knew him, Don. You two had very little to do with each other the last ten years—and I'm still not afraid to know him now. That's a boon and a burden. I know him. I also know what I'm missing."

"Oh _please_," Don whispered, unable to filter the bitter sarcasm, "you have to be loving this. No more questioning your orders. No more running up top to find Raph beat up or captured, or used as bait. The little brother you probably always wanted."

This time Leo _did_ scoff. "What, you mean the little brother who would follow me everywhere if situation allowed, watch everything I do, change expression immediately when I walk into a room, rely on me to understand him and lose his mind with frustration if I don't? _That_ little brother? I've always _had_ that little brother, Donnie. His name is Raph. Except now his moods are actually stable, he's seldom depressed, it doesn't take much to make him happy, and he's content just to be with one of us. He's as fully alive as he can be, Don—you have to stop talking like he's dead."

Donatello stepped closer, bring their faces a couple inches apart. "Easy for you to say—you don't even miss him. You think what he's doing now is _living_?"

"Losing the ability to pursue intellectual pursuits doesn't make someone dead, Donatello," Leo said, evenly. "And what do you pretend to know about what I miss?"

"Oh sorry, Leo—I should've read your blatant avoidance of it as grief for Raphael's loss instead of you expressing your new freedom to devote yourself to training while I'm stuck here."

Leo snapped back, wincing slightly, as though stung; he quickly checked himself, however. "I'm not avoiding the situation, Don. Me and Mikey are doing what we have to do. _That's_ the situation."

Don now realized he'd referred to Raphael, out loud, as _it_, and Leo had accordingly misunderstood him.

"Seems like what you and Mikey have to do is stay as far away from Raphael as you can—and I can't take doing this 24/7, Leo, I really can't. I've done it for a year and a half, being nursemaid to my brother and my father, and it's—you have no idea, Leo."

Leo grasped his shoulder. "Don, you know I help you and I'm available every moment I'm at home. If you ever want a break for a while—just say the word."

"And Mike?" Don said, rather aggressively.

Leo parsed his words for a few moments. "I don't think he'll do well taking care of Raph until he's able to accept what's happened. Don't you agree?"

Don almost snapped once more. "Mikey's mental health is the least of our worries right now."

Leo blinked a bit as in confusion. "I meant—well, he might not handle Raph very well. He's having trouble accepting this as reality."

Of all the people Don had once concerned himself with, it became strange to think what priority Mikey had once held for him; now he was mere nuisance, a person he shared a house with, whom he seldom spoke to and could not understand. A person who shirked the creature he had to deal with 24 hours a day—and it wasn't fair.

"It's not fair, Leo," Don whispered, his thoughts bubbling to the surface. "I need… I don't know. I feel like this punishment will never end. You and Mikey—living our lives for us—and me and Raph buried down here like _dead people_, I can't—I can't TAKE IT ANYMORE!"

"Keep your voice down!" Leo whispered sternly, as to deliberately juxtapose with him. "Do you need a break?"

Don swallowed mastering himself again. "I can do this, Leo. I'm more than capable. But—I mean, the only person who is ever here for even 24 hours at a time is Master Splinter. You guys—_you_—judge me, for how I handle this. But you've never even lived this for _24 hours_. I've been doing 24 hours—a year and a half's worth of 24 hours. It's endless, a march to nothingness, and I don't know who I despise more right now…"

Again, Leo almost willfully misunderstood him. "Don't hate us, Don. Raph—I mean, Mikey is the only one who's lost a big brother here—and to see him like this, Don. Mikey is trying to do so much good in the world, like he's carrying his brother's weight, and you don't see it. You're as disconnected from Mikey and he is from Raph. _I _have to deal with Mikey, who's been running into every form of trouble he can get his hands on—and you don't see that, anymore than he sees this. And if you think I do this every night, and don't miss Raphael—or you… you're crazy. Going from four to two is like torture. But we're all alive, and that's something to be thankful for—something Raph shows me, every time I see him. He loves us so much, and he's not afraid to show it now. You can't at least see some good in that?"

Don laughed. "Fine, you think that slobbering two-year-old is fun? Trade with me for a week, and we'll see how you feel."

Leo blinked, taken very much aback by Don's description. "Donnie, he's… he's Raph, don't _say_ that. And besides, you couldn't handle Mikey the way he's become. He's out of control, and even I can barely restrain him. And I don't have the medical know-how to deal with Raph for a week, Donnie. Believe me… if I could switch with you, I _would_. If you ask me, you've got the better end of the bargain here." He sighed. "But I'll take Raph for a couple days, as long as you keep up on medical stuff—I think I can get Mikey to stay home or stay with Casey and April for that long at least. And you can have a break. You sound like you're cracking up a little. I never thought I'd hear you talk that way about your brother—and he's so innocent now. He just wants… I don't know, some encouragement. You can't expect him to be the old Raph anymore, it's not fair to _him_."

Donnie became aware of the look of disgust creeping onto his face, and tried to tame it, like a bad hair day. "Leo—you don't _get_ it. My problem here is nothing like you dealing with a rebellious Michelangelo—you don't have to deal with the fact that _you_ did it, that it's _your_ fault, that at least one of your brothers _hates_ you for it, even though he'll never say it, and you don't have to deal with a _child_. He's—a BABY, do you understand?! He's a huge, strong, slightly insane toddler, who knows he used to understand things, and remembers that fact, and it makes him angry, Leo! He's angry at _me_. He shows it—he defies me openly, and gives me false hope, like he's bent on making me pay!"

He realized his eyes were closed when a gentle touch on his shoulder made him jump; they flew open, to Leo, with a deep look of concern; he appeared ten years older suddenly, and a different feeling of shame gripped Donatello heard, around the heart.

"Don. I mean it. You're taking some R and R—starting tomorrow. You're beginning to scare me."

Don gently wrenched himself away, staring at his elder brother. "I don't WANT a _break_! A break means that after two days, you and Mikey get to leave me with this again and feel good about yourselves for doing your Raph duty for the next year, and everything goes back to the way it is! I need you guys here. I need Mikey to get over himself and for you to open your eyes and see what Raphael's become. You don't get to say how wonderful everything is, how great it is to have this new Raph, because you _really_ don't live with it, Leo! I do! Master Splinter does, and it's—it's _killing him_. You think everything's wonderful? Things have to change! I don't want a band-aid, Leo; I want a cure!"

And there, _finally_, what Raphael could always do with such ease—a crack in Leo's perfect veneer, magma in the face of a porcelain mask. For a moment Leo stood, silent, on the brink, the slightest tremble wavering in his outline—then Don found himself dragged down the hallway, and forcibly jerked against a wall, staring into Leonardo's eyes—like his own, and like Raphael's, light brown, but always slightly topaz, glowing like a waiting tiger's in the brush.

"A _cure_? Wasn't that what _you_ were gonna find? Every damn day, Mike brings up the same thing with me—_you_, Donnie, and how you could fuck Raph up so bad and not know how to fix it, and you think I know how to answer that? What's your problem with me trying to be positive about this, anyway? You want me to hate Raph? When he's—just—when he's so"—he stopped, rapidly losing full and utter control of himself. "He's like a little kid; how can I hate him? How can I blame him now? When I know he's suffering? He's the one making the best of it"—

Don could no longer control the wave of disgust; it washed out onto his face, abrasive, acidic. "Stop blubbering. He throws tantrums over spaghetti. He learns words but still refuses to read them in sentences. Stop pitying him and feeling bad that he can't be Raphi again and help me show some discipline. You popping in every once in a while—you're like some spoiling uncle, you know? It's just… a nuisance. You and Mike. You're both just annoyances right now. And I need some help, not nuisances!"

Leo closed his eyes, and backed away a step, leaving Don free. "I… I can't. Mikey will keep doing what he's been doing. And I can't just… leave him, to do it alone. I can't lose another brother, Don—I need you to do your end down here, while I cover mine up there. I'll do my best to help you as much as I can. Really."

Don squinted at him in the dark hallway. He had poured the contents of himself free upon his brother, and had met with almost willful misunderstanding and impotence. The issue was beyond both of their grasps—Don could not conceive of what Mikey could _possibly _be doing that was so important, nor could Leo see what was so terrible about being with Raphael all day, who did little else but watch cartoons and eat cereal. They spoke from two different continents, across intermittent channels, in two dissimilar languages; brothers, they shouted over a great divide.

"Whatever," Don whispered, and brushed angrily past his older brother. He could feel Leo's eyes, long after he had passed out of the hallway; they branded him, with something like a glimmer of understanding, a beam of light illuminating solitary objects in one large, darkened room.

-- -- --

Donatello's favorite and first toys as a child were circuit boards. They were his model towns, his toy trains, his books and manuals—radios, motherboards, RAM chips, CD-ROMs. Even long before he fully understood what they did, each circuit board, big and small, looked to him like a world of its own, a miniature city of the future. He saw silos and roads, city blocks and mega centers, high rises, water plants and refineries—each unique, vastly new and exciting, and peopled only with his imagination. As he grew, he came to understand that a world did indeed exist in each board—electricity, connections, sparks from node to node, memory and virtual existence, expressed upon monitors and mathematics—but unlike cities of the world, where the burning of a single house left the greater whole standing, a single error—a white spot where the board had singed—meant the end of an era.

The brain is less like cities of the world, and more like this structure, this alien amalgamation, but in a very grave sense, Donatello never truly made the connection. He knew the anatomy of it, of course—he knew that if he damaged the motor region, the subject would no longer be able to move, throughout the body or only on one side, as with a stroke. Damage the amygdale and the subject would be rendered incapable of regular emotion. The brain, once damaged, hides a world irretrievable, vanishing into an untraceable void.

His brother was just that now—a world irretrievable.

Donatello was chasing his brother through the motherboard city, along green pathways, silicon and metal gleaming, while electricity crashed over them in this uninhabited ghost town of the future, in wild cracks and whip snaps above his head. He could see Raphael, around corners occasionally, always just a few too many steps ahead, his face indistinguishable—and at times, it seemed that the green turned to gray, he sunk to his ankles, and he was instead pursuing his brother along the corridors of the brain, squelching through paths of gray matter. While he ran, the electric cracks of miniature lightning strikes would at times ring in his ears—and in that tinny, monotonous, maddening sound, he bethought he heard a voice, familiar, on the corner of his reckoning, like a face he had not seen in too long a time.

He had this dream by night, and awoke, to forget nearly every detail—it came again, the next night, during the few hours of fitful sleep Morpheus granted him, like a soup bone from the greater table where all the world dined upon long hours of rest, and he eating the scraps at its feet. After these sleep-deprived nights, he had moments, perhaps for thirty seconds in his waking life, where he had the most curious sensation. In these moments, he felt persuaded that, during that almost third of his existence where he dreamed, he was another person, and lived another life, only to forget when awoken. And in these thirty seconds, he was again returned to that person, and felt a maddening sense of déjà vu for the wave of images and patterns, and the reminder of the words held locked within a mysterious voice—this feeling would pass, and he would ask himself what he could have been thinking. Yet the feeling persisted, and he could never shake the apprehension of its reoccurrence. Patterns, and the disconnect from the world and people around him, and the sudden sympathy with another world which flitted over his third eye. He was not a spiritual person in Leonardo's way; he found that too supercilious, too self-indulgent, a way of looking at the world that persuaded one that by doing nothing they did everything. No, he was a thinker and a doer—he would affect, dissect, and establish, leave his mark upon an uncaring world. Why then, must the voice allude him? He began to wonder if the experience was something other than mere sleep-deprivation, but instead something paranormal, proof, a message, from some invisible Other.

But weeks and months went by, and still the voice did not make sense, run as fast as he might to understand it.

_If you love a bird, set it free_.

This was Don's epistolary, written in the steam of the shower, in mist on glass walls, over and over, one layer of mist and words eclipsing the next. He pondered his own handwriting—Raph once said he should have been a doctor, looking at the all-caps indistinguishable, functional scrawl, more accustomed to numbers than letters. Too lethargic from the steaming hot water to attempt the ceiling, he wrote the words on the tile at his feet, and quicker than he could form the Roman symbols, cascades of water washed them deftly down into the void—into the drains, deeper than even they, where in the deep Raphael wandered, a hungry ghost.

_Set it free._

_Set it free. _

_Set it free._

SET. IT. FREE.

All in caps like the words of Owen Meany, like the text of Jesus, like an inward, permanent scream.

Steam formed and reformed, an eerie phantasmagoria, forms and faces in clouds. Raphael seven, Raphael nine, Raphael twelve, morph and alter as in an Ovid tale, from a smiling child to a slavering beast, and Don's eyes blurred, before logic reined again. He was wasting the water, and he had to get to breakfast. No time for thought. The days continue, inexorable, marching to an inevitable end.

Just as he turned the nozzle to end the sound of water pouring down, Don heard raised voices, and froze, listening to the hallway outside the bathroom intently.

"Leo, you can't seriously think it takes _three_ people to take care of Raphael for two days, d'you? You wanna give him a break, it's fine by me, but I got stuff to take care of!"

That had been Michelangelo, using dorsal tones Donnie didn't often hear out of him. Leo returned, rather calmer.

"Your 'stuff' as you call it never changes night to night and never will, Michelangelo! And rather than let you go two nights in danger, I'd rather you stay here. I don't need another crisis on my hands, thanks very much, and no one wants to come out to rescue you while I'm looking after Raphael and Donnie's getting some rest from all this."

Don knocked his head plaintively on the shower nozzle.

Leo.

Leo hadn't listened to a damn word while he'd spoken, and now that he was on the warpath and planning and making lists, there was no convincing him otherwise. Don slowly grabbed his towel.

"I can go to the surface without a babysitter, Leo, but thanks. I know you got all this pent up nagging energy with Raph out of commission"—

"_Auld MacDawnald had a faahm, ee-ai-ee-ai-yo!_"

Mikey started again, sounding remarkably more irritated. "God, can't you make him _stop_?! Where's Don?"

Don grinned unexpectedly; Leo sounded exasperated. "Donnie's in the shower, and if you want Raph to stop so much, _you_ ask him to quit—don't expect me to do all the brothering for you."

"He doesn't listen to me!"

"You hardly say a word to him, Michelangelo, and if he annoys you, you wander off and expect me or Don to do it. What the hell is up with you? You're well beyond the time you should have needed to get the reality of this through your head! You keep telling me you don't need a babysitter? Then stop acting like a child!"

"Dude, you wanna talk about acting like people're kids around here? I am _not_ gonna treat my older brother like a three-year-old, Leo! So screw off!"

Some stomping; a slammed door—the hallmarks of an angry teenager, though Mikey wouldn't be able to use that excuse for very much longer. Don toweled of—nothing like getting your daily household digest by listening through the bathroom wall.

He proceeded from the bathroom to see Leonardo, trying with some difficulty to reclaim control over his breathing. It was a moment before he noticed Don standing in the doorway, on the cusp of grinning an I-told-you-so grin, though he quelled it, knowing that to some degree Leo had also been right about Michelangelo's behavior. Splinter and Raphael sat before the TV, which their father had only just turned on, to stop his son from belting out renditions of "Old McDonald" again, which even Splinter was getting very tired of by this junction. Their father called back to them, gently.

"I think it is time Raphael had some lunch, my sons."

Don noticed nothing amiss in this—Leo had probably fed Raph even though that was something their sensei normally did. Leo, however, frowned.

"Master Splinter—you already gave him lunch today. I saw it when I was coming in."

The old rat appeared confused, but did not argue. "Yes, you're right. For some reason, I had believed it was yesterday. I must have given him the same lunch both days."

Leonardo nodded, letting this pass, but sent Donatello a meaningful look, and strode forward to grab his arm and lead him into the dojo.

"What now?" Don asked, impatiently. "He's forgotten stuff before."

Leo's eyes were severe. "You cannot leave Raphael alone with our father anymore like that, alright? If he's forgetting stuff"—

Don cringed. "He forgets something maybe once every two weeks, and it's never huge. Just something he does everyday, he'll confuse—like what time you and Mikey came home. It's nothing serious. You're freaking out over nothing."

Leo stood back thoughtfully, gazing at a scroll on the far wall; this was once a place of peace—and was now vastly underused.

"I was thinking of maybe asking April to come in a couple days a week, lend a hand… it hurts to ask her, but I'm really not sure how else to relieve the pressure on you…"

Don scoffed. "You can tell Michelangelo to stop acting like a petulant child and help"—

"Or you could tell him so—ever think of that, genius?" Leo prompted, sounding for a moment like a brother that they had been long missing. Donatello laughed.

"Ha! If Raphael is my responsibility, then Mikey gets to be yours—since he's so conveniently your excuse"—

"Oh, am I?"

Leo and Don both whirled; Mike had appeared in the dojo door, their shouting having masked his rather loud approach, so they only had themselves to blame for his overhearing. His eyes gleamed blue murder, dark and hooded from long nights and too little sleep, deeply juxtaposed against the bright orange of his bandana. He approached them, and the pop of his knuckles cracked audibly close to their ears.

"I'm no one's responsibility—so you guys stop worrying about what I'm doing and find a plan for fixing Raph, because this stupid waiting around is making me nuts. I don't care if we have to sell our souls or suck up to some stupid tycoon—but we gotta do something! What the heck is wrong with you two?"

This was quite enough for Don's already paper-thin rope; before Leo could respond or even prevent it, Donatello had dragged Mike inside the dojo, slammed the door shut, and spun his brother around until he was pinned, plastron down, on the tatami mats, with Donnie's foot pressed into his carapace.

"Alright then, shell-for-brains, let me explain this to you in a way you can understand. There—is—no—cure—for—this! You think if there was a way out, I wouldn't have tried it? Huh? You think I like taking care of an idiotic, drooling, tantrum-throwing little child, like I know of all these miraculous cures but instead I've been waiting around on my ass so they can grow on me? Is that what you think?!"

Both of them getting over their shock, Leo sprang forward to pull Don away just as Mikey spun around, to get back up to his feet. His face, quite unlike Donatello's, held very steady, eyes unwavering. He no longer raised his voice; Leonardo, knowing they both needed to have it out, kept his silence.

"You don't wanna know what I think, Don. So let's cut the bull and just agree to keep not talking about it." He tried to stride proudly out, but Don would have none of it, grabbing the edge of his carapace none-too-gently.

"Oh yeah? Well maybe I'd like to know what's so important, that you'd go up top and forget Raph and I are down here, and that maybe I could use a little help? You ever think that maybe the idea of doing this for the rest of my life might—I don't know what I'm saying"—

Mike's voice was quiet and poisonous. "You're the genius. If you could mess him up this bad, you can figure out a way to fix it, if you hate watching him that much. There're important things I have to do too, Donnie. There are worse things you could be doing, ya know, than taking care of a toddler."

Donatello laughed in his face. "You talk big for someone who's never done it, Michelangelo. And it's not like he's just my brother—he's yours too, and he'd probably do much better with you being with him sometimes. I'm not asking you to be here 24/7—just take a shift every third day or so, be the one to get him something when he's upset once in a while instead of looking at me to make him shut-up! Own him like he's your brother"—

Mike's eyes flashed with anger. "Ya know what, Don—if Raph were himself right now—he'd hate me for treating him the way you do! When we have him back—if I were to tell him I'd tried to teach him his ABC—I can't do that to him!"

Don made a feral sound of exasperation. "He's not coming back! You mean _you_ can't do that to _yourself_, you can't bear to accept it like it's real, so you'll keep running until he's back to normal, and he never will be—and I really don't know what his last wishes would've been. I don't even know if he would have wanted to live like this"—

"Of course he wouldn't!" Mike retoured, unthinking. "He could barely take being injured, or being, like, so weak we had to haul him away from a battle—he wouldn't just hate us, he'd hate himself"—

"That's enough!" Leo's voice cut between them, slicing them apart, and his younger brothers both turned to gaze at him in wonder, as though forgetting he was there. "Stop talking about him like he's _dead_!" With this, he whirled, and stalked from the dojo; the moment he opened the door, however, he found Raphael in the entrance way, attracted to their voices—Splinter having dozed off before the television unwittingly, thinking Raphael had done so as well. He waved rather cheerfully at Michelangelo, who's carapace was still in the grips of Don.

"Hi, Maikay. Come ta pray?"

Mike blinked, looking very unsure what to do, having been addressed—he was rather good with kids, but he still could not adapt himself to treating Raph like one of the number.

"Uhh… pray? Pray in the dojo?" He searched Don and Leo's eyes for answers, hopefully. Don scowled at him and said nothing, prompting Leo to answer, gently.

"Play, Mike. He means play."

Asking to go to the Oscars with Cindy Crawford couldn't have made Michelangelo appear more awkward. After a moment of silence, looking anywhere but at his brother, he finally began to raise his eyes.

"Umm… not now, Raph—maybe some other"—here he stopped, inexplicably, his face turned from Don and Leo, and looking fully into Raphael's, as though studying it. His eyes moved again, taking in the wasting form of a brother he had barely glanced at for over a year, seeing it anew, as for the first time. He murmured under his breath, almost so Leonardo couldn't hear him.

"Bruises."

It was at that moment that Donatello noticed just how filthy the dojo was.

"MASTER SPLINTER!" Michelangelo yelled a second later, marching both himself and Raphael down the hallway—Leonardo, however, knowing exactly which bruises his brother was seeing and the cause, ran after to prevent him from worrying their father, pausing in the door. Don frowned at him, but continued inspecting the dojo.

"We really need to clean this place before the mats start degenerating," he said, off-hand; it was this very uncaring, which should have set off bells in Leo's head, that signified to him Donatello's innocence, as he wasn't in the least defensive; looking relieved, Leo continued back on his mission, leaving Don behind to his musings.

Splinter was half-way across the den to Michelangelo's shouts by the time Mike had marched in with a laughing and befuddled Raphael in tow, convinced they were now "praying." He waved at Splinter, enthusiastically.

"Hi, Dah—Maikay an' me're prayin'."

Splinter exhibited a tight-lipped, concerned smile at his son, who hadn't the foggiest what was going on, and turned to Mike, who contritely held up Raphael's arm for inspection, his face stormy. Their father was silent for a moment; in this time, Raphael's expression changed to bored.

"Do'ter? Hate da do'ter. Maikay, Dohnay prays da do'tor, n-noh you."

Splinter smiled more gently at him this time, tracing the bruise, and Leo had by now caught up to them; before the eldest could speak, Splinter answered his fears.

"I have already seen this, Michelangelo. I am surprised it has not faded, but Raphael's immunities are not as they once were." His ears lifted off his head, crisis averted. "Had you been among us more often, my son, you might know that on occasion our Raphael still shows his physical strength and gets himself into scrapes. Donatello looks after him, however."

Leonardo's previous concern could not win out against the feeling of relief and renewed hope at his younger brother's reaction to seeing bruises on Raph; rather than address it and embarrass him, however, he spoke to Raphael, who still appeared bored.

"I know you get the doctor visits a lot, Raph, but Mike was just checking on you. Wanna play with the Scrabble letters?"

"Lettahs? T-taeech meh uh new wahd?"

Leonardo grinned, feeling his father and brother's eyes. "Sure—animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

Michelangelo remained silent, watching them, the slightest line of a frown between his eyes, and Splinter interjected.

"His sentences are very good, Leonardo. You should be proud of your teaching skills."

Leo's smile at this appeared pained; when he guided Raph away, he found Mike following them.

"What?" Mikey asked him, when Raphael had hold of the Scrabble letters and was sorting through them for the right word. "You just pissy cuz Raph can't do more right now?"

Leo shook his head. "No—it's not that at all. It's just… Master Splinter has said the same thing to me ten times now."

If Michelangelo grasped the meaning of this, he didn't say; he stood by watching for a few minutes, before Leo spoke to him again.

"You can go out for a few hours tonight—I want you back by 2 AM though, so you can be alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic for a shift in the morning."

He expected a complaint in response, or something biting; he received neither. Had he not been a ninja, Leonardo would never have perceived the way in which his brother ghosted from his side—as unreal and ethereal as Raphael was a sitting, cold slab of reality, spelling words proudly.

RAFHEL.

LIONADOH.

MASSER DAH.


	5. Tumbling after

Author's Notes: A major thanks to all the reviewers so far--I'm normally good about responding to reviews, so if you haven't received a personally-crafted Aub!response yet, you will soon. And I'm really sorry this is coming up late. I was trying to finish Dare ga, then got sorta waylaid by this other project which is kinda huge, and forgot to update. Now that it's midterms--guess who's procrastinating!? XD Anyways, props to Tori and especially to that Donnie-guru, Winnychan, for helping me get this story to the point it's at. Enjoy!

--

Michelangelo spent his time away while Leonardo took his first full-term shift over Raphael, setting his plan into action without further argument with a soul; the first thing he noticed was that Donatello made himself scarce, and he had to thank him for this. However, he forced himself to note that Don wasn't relaxing either; when he saw him, Donatello was in a bustle of energy and action, making his brother think that perhaps he'd come up with a solution and his old inventing juices had flown back to him. The renditions of Old McDonald had come to a complete and utter end. Raphael did all that Leonardo told him, watching his brother nearly every moment in the fashion which irritated Don, saddened Splinter, and disturbed Michelangelo, but which made Leonardo smile unabashedly; he provided his ailing brother with a model and watched him, in the smallest steps imaginable, improve, and grow increasingly like the sibling he had lost.

Today he'd turned cleaning the kitchen area and clearing away things to people's rooms into a game, which Raphael eagerly engaged in.

"Okay, Raph, now we have a sudsy table—can you spell 'sponge' in the suds for me?" He here showed his brother how to form letters in the white sheen over the wood, and Raph caught on within seconds, beginning the spelling.

S.

Raphael made a few soundless motions with his mouth, sounding out the word to himself. Leo was sure to relieve the pressure by spelling simple words on his side, letting his brother work it out without someone noticeably watching him and expecting. This was not a test—just a game.

"Sp—spu—spu"—Raphael sounded, his brow furrowed.

P.

A green streak wandered past Leonardo's peripheral vision, and he wrapped his head around to look one way, then the next, to see Donatello, whipping out cleaning supplies from under the sink. Leo smiled, bemused, but unwilling to show it—Raphael glommed onto his emotions without fail.

"Cleaning the lab out, Don?" He heard the hope in his own voice; hope for himself, for his father, certainly for Michelangelo, and most assuredly for Don—but he wasn't sure if it was for Raph, who continued spelling, progressing, his tongue between his teeth. He felt he could want it for his family. But could he want it for Raphael?

U.

A quick erase with a finger, more sounding out.

"Spu—spun"—

Don summarily ignored Raph, looking briefly into Leo's eyes.

"Yeah. Just finished the dojo."

Leo frowned slightly, but quickly hid it, and Raphael, spelling out with his head down, was none the wiser for it.

"Thought we were gonna help you with the dojo?"

Don bustled in the cabinet, coming out with metal cleaners and lime and rust removal agents, testing the caps to be sure he could get all the containers open.

"It's okay, I got it."

Leo shrugged. "Alright then. As long as it's relaxing—helping you think, maybe? That's how I am when I clean"—

"Helping me think," Don interrupted, absorbed in the task at hand, and brushing past Leo with his arms full. "Don't feed him Spaghetti-Os again for dinner. He needs the container of vegetable I portioned out for him in the fridge."

And almost before Leo had caught these last instructions, spoken without looking at him and in a detached voice, Don had disappeared.

His space is full of ghosts lingering in cobwebs, dust from the past—he looks at scales discarded in the wear-and-tear of everyday life and each time, he can't push off the notion that they may be Raph's, and he asks himself_—if I checked, would I be able to tell the difference, genetically, between him __then__ and him __now__? I know, of course, that there will be no difference; but if DNA is such a foolproof way of identifying, how could anyone say, that this being now is the same being as that being then, as that __person__ then? _Would he be guilty of the same crimes, the same temperaments, the same virtues?

_There should be some marker; some genetic code that says, "Donatello was here. Donatello fucked up." But I never got to the gene therapy part of my schemes. No—I created a nanobot, and infiltrated Raphael's brain, and attempted to fix secretions in the amygdale, and miscalculated the region, and caused a series of seizures, which triggered mass brain damage. My attempts to save the motor regions through a badly-managed set of decisions and electrical impulses, which were meant to interrupt the seizures, short-circuited the nanobot, and it remains lodged in a portion of my brother's Temporal lobe to this day._

_I do not have the material for another nanobot in order to retrieve the last, and I am certain that it will do little good; the nanobot's presence might cause another series of seizures or a stroke, and reduce him to a vegetable, and no matter my brother's insistence, I refuse to risk it. Perhaps it is the refusal to risk that keeps my brother in this state. I haven't done much in my lab over the last year; I gave up after the last jury-rigged MRI, seeing the inactive nanobot, with no way to dissolve or remove it, other than cracking his head open. There is no scientific evidence that the removal of this small robot will fix my brother or do him any good, so why risk? Short of expecting a miracle, I wash my hands of it._

But that is precisely what he cannot do.

_I can't even wash my lab of its signs, of the stench of my own failure—and worse, because when I fail, I do it grandly. I've soaked myself in lime and rust remover, paint-thinner, metal cleaner, diluted bleach, and it remains—I can see the control there in my mind's eye, playing God with my brother as he twitches, convulses on the table in front of me, and I'm in control, in control, in control—_

_Raph's losing sections of the brain, one by one, flashing, blinking on and off, the déjà vu should be in his eyes as neurons fire and misfire, and blackness is overtaking him, and move it away from the motor regions, anything but that, he could never handle being bed-ridden—he's not an intellectual person, he won't mind, it's a small sacrifice if he can still run and kick and punch and flip—that's my brother, he could never be in a wheelchair, thinking but not moving. So it went to the cerebral cortex… crawled into the Frontal lobe. Vision, cognition, some temporary memory loss, not so bad. He should still remember much of himself. It was the Frontal lobe, after all, some damage in the Occipital and Temporal lobes… I kept the damage to a minimum. _

_Some vision impairment. Some loss of judgment and problem-solving abilities. Problems with talking, with language, with sense of self, with controlling his emotions once he's been wound up. Some of these areas were only damaged—very little nerve death, really. In a muscle, this would be easy to allow to heal—but how do you shut the brain off to let nerves repair? Some has gotten better over time. His vision has returned—almost perfectly. Damage to the Occipital was low, really. I kept him blindfolded for a bit, let things fix themselves. But I can't stop him from trying to relearn how to read again, can't stop him from trying. I don't know how much he's forgotten. Memory is in the Temporal lobe… but he understands language remarkably well now, though his ability to process information has slowed. I don't know what he remembers. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe he remembers that I did this to him. Maybe he remembers that he agreed. _

_Maybe it's like Leo says. He's happier this way._

He'd soaked his hands in lime and rust remover, soaked it to the bone like a sponge, the cleaning agents racing through his veins. The laboratory is his body turned inside out, and he sees there the dust collecting, as he absorbs it into himself, cleans it, gets in control, and thinks. Think. Think.

There has to be a way out.

Sometimes after the death of a loved one we experience a long period, in which we continuously expect the departed will arrive through a door, unharmed and the same as ever, and life will continue; this feeling eventually fades, and only this act of fading reconciles us to the idea that the loved one is gone.

Not so for Donatello and his family. If Raphael had truly died they would expect him every day through the door, stomping in and making as much noise as possible, perhaps angry, perhaps grinning in rakish triumph, perhaps grabbing Michelangelo for noogies or shouting some challenge or taunt at Leo, or asking Don what pizza sounded good for dinner, and to toss him "a ninja slice" so he could catch it on his sai. His loud voice would boom eerily through the lair, telling stories about the fall of Shredder, or asking questions that Splinter couldn't answer, or demanding reasons for their existence or yelling about the unfairness of the world—all of those things his brothers thought but never voiced.

But this impression was never there. The physical body of Raphael, this walking, talking, yet very new being, stood in his place, and disallowed them from any reconciliation. They had lost a person, true—but there was no space to mourn his death, no absence in which to delude themselves, only a continuous, fatal hope.

And it was the first time in his life that Michelangelo could say he was sick of cartoons.

His father had finally slipped away to bed, and Leo was sitting up late with cartoons going, while Raphael—who hadn't been able to sleep from some form of excitement, which his brother was unable to find the source of—was close to dozing off at last. Michelangelo stayed on the stairs, a sleepless wraith in the shadows, watching and letting the sound of mindless Coyote and Roadrunner antic tinkles fill the lair from floor to ceiling, melting into its farthest nooks. There was a time when his own TV-watching had filled their home with these sounds, but now they had an entirely new meaning for him. Four twenty-year-olds lived here. If a newcomer (there were none of course) were to walk into the lair, the first thing they would ask themselves would be, "Where's the little kid living here?" It was a theoretical situation, but Michelangelo's mind, when unoccupied, had been stealing down the corridors of many theoretical situations over the past year; his life now, if he squinted hard enough, could seem to him like just another one of their number.

A flicker; Leo passed his eyes at him, reflecting the light of the TV, and his vision caught it, before his brother's attention returned to Wile E. Coyote strapping himself to an ACME rocket. They acknowledged each other's presence; Mike stole quietly to his father's vacant chair beside the couch, and sat down.

"Doesn't he have, like, a bedtime?" he whispered, seeing Raphael's eyes close a bit, before opening to take in the cartoons again, unable to bear missing knowing whether the coyote would get the roadrunner this time at last.

Leo chuckled. "He's not a growing boy, Mike. His body is still twenty, no matter what his mind thinks—so not really. He'll get as much or little sleep as he needs; there isn't much to wake him up in the mornings, and too much keeping him up at night, anyways."

"Hm," Mike said by way of understanding. He had never returned home early enough to know a shred about Raphael's sleeping habits; he'd left, sometimes, when Don was trying to get Raphael to sleep with a book, pleading, arguing, et cetera, and ignored it. Don probably just wanted Raph sleeping for as much time as he could get. Time to himself to think. Mike couldn't say he disagreed.

"What's Don up to?" Mike queried, after watching the coyote slam right into a train because he painted a tunnel.

Leo heaved a sigh. "He's"—

"Sponge," Raphael said, half-awake.

"Huh?"

Leo smiled, as Raph's head finally fell on his shoulder, eyes half open. "His new word I taught him—he learned it pretty well today. Nice of Don to show us so many examples, huh Raph?"

Raphael nodded, moving slightly to get more comfortable. After some thought and a frown, he looked at his younger brother, as though he had something very important to tell him.

"Maikay, Dohn didn' let us hep wissa dojo."

Leo frowned slightly, though he knew Raphael couldn't see it; he had an arm around his brother and was using it to pull a blanket over his shoulders.

"Yeah, that was weird, wasn't it? Maybe he just wants to be by himself. Everyone needs that sometimes."

Mike sat with his elbows leaning into his knees, hunched over and pondering. He could almost fool himself into thinking it was a conference between himself and his brothers, as in old times—had Raphael not been leaning against Leo so shamelessly.

"We gave him time to figure this stuff out, why's he cleaning?" Mike hissed, as reality struck him in the face once more through a dance of incongruities; this was not his past life, and he wanted that back. And Donatello could give that to him.

Raphael sat unaffected for a moment, before there showed a crease between his eyes, the same kind which his brothers got when in deep thought. Leonardo answered right away, however.

"Have you seen the lab? He hasn't touched it seriously in months. If he's going to do anything, he's gotta clean."

A few moments of silence passed before Raphael had collected his thoughts enough to speak.

"Wha's bake, Leo?"

Mike attempted not to roll his eyes and turned back to the TV, which wasn't much better, while Leo responded.

"A break, Raph—you know what that is."

A look of frustration came over Raphael's face, but he sat still, thinking very hard.

Mike chuckled slightly. "Maybe he doesn't know what we're givin' Don a break _from_."

Leo's mouth worked, as though he were pressing his tongue between his teeth, and an odd, pained look stole over him, though he directed it away from his siblings, and at the TV. Raphael's frown deepened. Only the sound of Wile E. Coyote getting flung from a catapult at break-neck speed and the "meep meep"s of the roadrunner filled the room for a time, until Raphael broke it, sending a strangely annoyed glance at Michelangelo.

"I know, Maikay."

Mike's eyes widened slightly, taken aback, while Leo laughed openly, his own tension popped; his arm tightened around his brother, resting on the edge of his carapace.

"You tell him, Raph." Leo gazed at Mike for a moment. "You sure pissed him off. He never gets annoyed. Well—except with Don. But I would too. Don's pretty happy thinking Raph's—well. Not all there."

Mike folded his arms, confused. "Huh?"

"He's not crazy, Mike. He's totally rational. Just… a little slower than he used to be, is all."

Mike frowned at the fact that Raphael was still sitting there—but his fear was unnecessary, as Raph had drifted off to sleep. He grabbed the remote.

"Keep it low," Leo warned in an undertone, as Mike started, with evident relief, to flip channels. His voice turned bored. "CNN again?"

"Naw, figured out how to pirate BBC America. Their voices crack me up. More reliable news, anyways."

Leo grinned wryly; he had his cheek lightly resting atop Raphael's head now, tracing the slight rise and fall of his breathing. "Need some coffee and your slippers while you're at it, old man?" Mike's early return evidently had placed him in remarkably good spirits.

"That's my line, dude." No smile on Mike's face, but no hostility either. He remained silent, finding BBC America and watching with a strange, restless discontent that remained nonetheless remarkably familiar, leaning forward, reclining against his knees and studying the screen, as though searching, waiting for something.

"The British don't remember him either, Mike," Leo said, almost inaudibly. Michelangelo ignored him, continuing to watch and wait, before changing the subject.

"You're not gonna, like, put him to bed or anything?"

Leo retained his earlier frown, worrying over the screen, working his tongue. "Everything doesn't have to be the exact same as the day before. The mindless routine… it's enough to drive anyone insane."

Mike sat and watched him for a few moments, eyes moving over his brothers—Raphael unmasked, his face vacant of frowns, of extreme expressions, wiped blank of the past twenty years' stresses and the build-up of pride which collects in the pores and the lines of age, all gone, marks and endearments disappeared into the void. Forgetfulness is the price of innocence, drinking deep of the waters before embarking on new life.

But it was Leo who held his gaze, the irrepressible change, the loss of tension in his shoulders which returned every moment he chased Michelangelo outside the lair. He sat with a brain-damaged brother using him as a pillow as though he _belonged_, and a strange mingled perfume of pity, regret, and envy stole over Mike as he took it in. It began to occur to him—even if they were to receive Raphael in all his repossessed glory back to themselves—would they be the same household? They—_they_ being everyone but Michelangelo—had been willing to see Raphael in this new light, to overlay his new identity over the old, to relegate the brother and son they had known and loved for two decades to a place of death and shadows. Could Raphael reintegrate into this changed breed of family, into the limelight of new gazes, which had seen him in this terrible, vulnerable, humble state, his pride stripped away in bloody ribbons—Mike resisted the urge to kick these thoughts violently away from himself like a repressively hot layer of blankets.

He couldn't help wondering, looking upon this new Raph, and this new Leo that had sprung up out of the ashes of his old self to match him, if Leo would welcome the previous brother back again. Michelangelo carried a Raphael down inside his gut, who refused to let a doppelganger paint him over, and the picture there had festered within him, crawled through his veins, turned him translucent as a ghost, and he hazed through a world which demanded to go forward into this ridiculous new future, which never should be, which was not the path that his life, their lives, were meant to travel, and Michelangelo had stayed on the crossroads. This picture before him, this loving portrait of a brother comforting a brain-damaged sibling and finding relief to the pain, reconciling—Michelangelo didn't belong in it any longer. The lair was a land out of science fiction now, unreal, cardboard and dye.

In this unassailable _jamais vu_ Michelangelo floated, before abruptly switching the channel to a Korean soap opera and tossing Leo the remote.

"Goin' t' bed. Early shift, right?" he mumbled, already passing away, to vanish before his brother could respond.

"Yeah," Leo whispered, unaware whether Mike was even there, and switched the channel to Tom and Jerry, in case Raphael awoke again, and felt himself dozing off against the warm mass resting on his shoulder, breathing steadily. Flesh and blood, taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide, and he could count the breaths. _One, two, one, two_. As comforting as a lullaby, and his own voice hummed by rote—yet he could no longer remember the words that accompanied the melody.

Patience had never been one of Michelangelo's strong suits; he was helped most of the next day—despite it being "his shift"—by both Leonardo and his father. Splinter gave Raph lunch, Leo got him into the bath, and really all that Michelangelo had to do was dinner, keep Raph amused—which wasn't hard when Raph could play with Scrabble letters, spelling books, and the Etch-a-Sketch for happy hours on end—and get Raph to bed before he left the lair to do his business outside. His patience stretched through this time because there was nothing, in the daylight at least, to be doing elsewhere. He could stand to help Raph write words in crayon, to passively partake of a game of Scrabble with him and Leo, and to watch Don pass in and out of his lab in a flurry of motion, and wait for the wondrous solution his genius brother must inevitably have hatched.

When he knew the sun had set, however, he was itching for Raphael to show signs of fatigue; but some things never change. Raph was a night owl for years before the accident, and upon the sun setting, he seemed charged with new energy, wanting to run about the lair and play a muddled game of basketball where Raph repeatedly passed the ball and never shot it. It was only seven. Still early. Unreasonable to think his brother would be tuckered out by now.

Eight o'clock; Splinter sat amused watching Michelangelo give a small skateboard exhibition for Raph, keeping the frustration from his face in a display that would have made Leo proud, the eldest of the brothers being meanwhile in the dojo doing the training he had neglected the day before and then some. Raphael clapped and ran beside Mike, more than amused—amazed—at some of the tricks his sibling could do, but Mike kept the gratifications of this far from his heart. Raphael had never clapped or wowed at his stunts before, though he'd sometimes grunt a "cool." Only Leo would allow himself to be flattered and happy through the degradation of his younger brother, and Mike would have none of it.

He'd rather thought that after all this exercise Raphael might finally feel like nodding off; by nine, when he'd gotten his brother into his room for a book, bed was the last place Raph would go. He sat instead on the floor amid colorful letters and sheets of paper, determined to "write." Mike stood awkwardly for a moment, afraid as he'd been before his first sea of children on Cowabunga Carl's maiden voyage. He had no idea how to handle it—but knew running to Leo might mean more hours of this torture at a later date.

"Raph—_please_ go to bed. Just this once, okay? For me?" His voice was sugary; the best tactic was always to try honey first, and let the kid think you were being obliging. Raph shook his head, however, making Mike's heart sink.

"Noh tired, Maikay. Pray lettahs wis me, plaise?"

Rolling his eyes slightly, Mike sat cross-legged across from his brother. "Raph, come on. You've been up since six this morning—and me too, dude. Don't you wanna sleep?" His voice was starting to sound coaxing.

He had to hand it to Raph; he had more patience now than he'd ever had before. A shake of the head, and repeating, in the exact same easy tone of voice:

"Noh tired, Maikay. Pray?" He held up a crayon, but Mike ignored it, rubbing his eyes slightly in frustration.

"Look, Raph, I'm in charge right now and I say you need to try to sleep. I guaran-freakin'-_tee_ you when you get in that bed, you'll feel a lot more sleepy than you think."

Raphael watched him for a moment, evidently processing this—Mike had used vocabulary he didn't often hear these days. Then again… maybe that was a look of annoyance, steadily staring back at him. His next words seemed to confirm it.

"Maikay, you in chahge a' may?"

Mike smiled slightly; something about that small glean of annoyance made him feel a strange, welcome satisfaction.

"Yeah, in fact I am, until you go to bed. So get into it like I said and I'll read you a book, and you'll feel much sleepier than you think you will, really."

Raphael blinked several times, the processing clear behind his brown eyes; at length, he seemed to choose ignoring this annoyance, in hopes that it would go away, and looked down at a sheet of paper, grasping a crayon clumsily with now ill-coordinated hands. Amazed, Mike looked on, unsure how to proceed, until lowly Raph began to sing "Old McDonald."

_Oh man… he musta took annoying little brother 101 from me… it's like the worst joke karma ever played._

"Stop, Raph. Get to bed," Mike said, now taking a firm line and standing up, holding out a hand to get his brother to his feet. "Now."

Ignored. Raph began writing in big, sloppy block letters, laboring over each line, and pausing every now and then as though to call the appropriate strokes into memory.

"Auld Makdonald had a fahm, ee-ai-ee-ai-oh…"

Raphael's voice, slurred, that deep baritone which once called Shredder down and defied legions of Foot soldiers, that barrel-chested laugh, the death-daring "HA"—all reduced to that unbearable jingle of a children's verse. Michelangelo felt a strange rage rising in him.

"Auld Makdonald had a fahm, ee-ai-ee-ai-oh!"

"Stop it! Go to bed! I mean it!"

Raphael stopped and gazed at him, taking this in, and a small anger, trapped and restless, sprung to his eyes.

"Nah da boss a' me, Maikay!" The crayon in his hand jabbed into the paper, and he hit it with a full, bottled frustration Mike had never yet seen close-up before. "NO! Nah da boss a' me, no no NO!"

Mike was too angry and out of patience by now, after a day of this toddler who resembled his brother, to take this in.

"What, do I have to spell it out for you? GO. TO. BED."

The turn in his direction was abrupt this time, and the rage unmistakable in Raphael's eyes; he took no time to think, but barreled out:

"B—E—D!"

Raph held his gaze for a very long, unwavering amount of time, and Mike hovered, silenced and quivering. The defiance had taken the breath out of his lungs for a moment; the lasting expression on Raphael's face had haunted it a million times over their lifetime, and Mike, though he hadn't known it until that moment, had begun to forget what it looked like.

"Raph…" Mike whispered, with a strange feeling of shame, but the look didn't change. He backed away. "Fine. I can't take this anymore," he said, more to himself than anybody; when he left, Raphael was again writing on the papers before him in a mad, pointed frenzy.

Michelangelo stopped by Leo's door and flung it open. "He's all yours; I'm out of here."

Leo started up after him. "Wait—Mike, what happened? Mike!"

But Michelangelo was trotting away into the darkness again, wiping at his face as he went, and Leo, knowing his father was turning in, went to check on Raph instead of chasing after.

He came in upon Raph in a more unstable state than he'd seen him in a great while, writing obsessively in huge letters over papers strewn across the floor—backwards K's, unrecognizable M's, A's which stretched over two sheets and separated to create disjointed lines and sounds.

"Raph? What are you doing? Tell me what's wrong," he implored, trying to get his distracted brother to meet his gaze; he received no answer.

Infuriated, Raph threw down the crayon instead and turned, for the first time since he'd been brain damaged, to his low bookshelf, and began taking out titles, leafing through them, and putting them down at random. Leo bounded forward now, dropt to his knees and grabbed Raphael's arms, forcing their eyes to connect.

"Raph—stop—stop it!" At last the connect happened, and Raphael's struggling diminished. "What are you looking for? What's wrong? Tell me and I'll help you."

He retained the connection, watching Raph process this, giving it extra consideration, formulating a response to give voice to the flurry of disjointed thoughts inside his brain.

"Ded I r-r-raight stuff, Reo?"

Leo frowned for a moment, comprehending. "Have you—did you write stuff?" He looked at the bookshelf, at a loss. "I… I don't know. Not much that I know of." He paused, gazing into his sibling and attempting to decipher his motivations. "Why?"

Much thought went into his halting answer. "Wanna—wanna sae… wah et looks like, Leo."

Leo blinked several times, too surprised to even feel the rightful joy he should have found in this.

"Uh—okay. I'll help you find something. But you have to calm down—alright?"

Very slowly, Raphael nodded, and Leo let go of his arms at last, to take hold of a pile of papers and notebooks crammed haphazardly atop the second row of books. He took the sheaf in his arms—some old motorcycle manuals, a couple sports magazines—Raph had never been the type to keep things for one reason or another unless they were useful. A list made out by Don of parts Raph needed to fix his motorcycle—which he'd left unfinished when the accident happened. A few small checkmarks rested beside several of the parts. Instructions, again from Don, on how to disable the security system to get inside—Raph had probably kept it so he'd know it wasn't floating around somewhere.

He felt Raphael studying him as he gazed upon each saved article left behind; the feeling was singularly unnerving. After all, these things _belonged_ to him, didn't they? He'd been the one to leave them here, had all the reasons, and yet…

Leo closed his eyes briefly before continuing his search. For a moment he became afraid that the only marks he could show his brother—the only marks Raph had left behind him—were miniscule checks on a list he never finished. But near the bottom of the pile, he struck gold.

It was an incomplete draft of a letter to their father while Splinter had once been away on a visit to the Ancient One; why Raphael had kept it he couldn't figure, other than some depths of sentimentality Leo'd never fathomed. But at the bottom he found his reason… good old predictable, pragmatic Raphael had been true to his spots. Casey had jotted down his and April's new number in the corner. Leo found himself smiling, before remembering his mission, and handing the letter over to his brother for inspection.

Raph's handwriting had always been remarkably better when it was to be seen by his father; deliberate and painfully made out, his handwriting still managed to be a bit sloppy—Raph's credo was that if it was readable, then it was good enough. But here he'd taken time with it, the words perfectly spelt (Raph in general had too much pride to go around misspelling words, and was embarrassed and blustery if Don or Leo pointed one out to him), and his tone had that air of macho distance that a proper teenager has in correspondences to parents. Through this, it was plain how much he had missed his father and was refraining from letting him think he wanted him to come back or in any way needed him, which always bespoke the opposite.

Raphael held the letter gingerly in both hands, gazing at it for a long time, staring hard at the page as though deciphering a deeper meaning within its scratchy black lines.

Leo watched him; he didn't want to regret his next soft-spoken question, but couldn't resist asking it.

"Do you remember writing it?"

Raphael didn't answer him. He set the letter down gently, pulled a sheet of paper towards him from the nearby confusion, and a crayon, and hunched over, grasping the implement determinedly. Glancing between the pages, he started forming lines. Leonardo held his breath, watching Raph spell out the first word of the letter—"Hey"—again, and again, not satisfied with each rendition, and going back to do it over. They looked nothing alike. The painstaking, hard-pressed crayon words held no resemblance to their easier-scrawled counterparts, as though drawn by two different people.

When the page was filled up with fruitless "Hey"s, Raphael finally dropped the crayon and straightened, looking into Leo's saddened, waiting face.

"I'm sohry, Leo."

It was one of the clearest things he'd ever said to him.

Leo stared for a moment, before shaking his head fiercely, and pulling his brother close to him in a desperate embrace.

"Don't—_never_ be sorry. You're still here—I'm not sad about that." Leo took a shuddering breath. "There are worse things."

He worked to avoid the terrible, dark thoughts at the back of his head, asking him:

_Like what?_


	6. Ashes, Ashes

Author's Notes: Thanks to Ivy for helping me with a part of this story and for some helpful (and evil) suggestions. Warnings in this chapter for language and some uncomfortable content. Big thanks to all the reviews so far for this story, feedback always greatly appreciated, and enjoy!

--

The wraith slipped along the walls like a black oil slick, stealing into the shadows of the old garage; with phantasmagoric hands, it flipped back a rustling old tarp with the sound of leathery wings that suddenly filled still air, and a puff of dark dust rose into the environs like an ominous cloud. Through that mist, something gleamed and glittered, the eye of a beast newly opened to re-greet the world, some silvery evil there in the darkness.

There had to be a way out.

--

Don hadn't done inventory of his parts storage in over a year—and why should he? The van had been fine… all the other vehicles had received little maintenance. And he no longer had Raph coming to him every other freaking DAY for parts on that bike he was indulgent enough to build for him. He'd been a good older brother, hadn't he? Not everyone wants Mother Dearest Leonardo pulling you into his lap for a band-aid and kisses, making you hot cocoa and pinning your lunch to your plastron in the morning.

He began sorting through the carburetors.

He supposed this could be his Zen—there was something mindless about inventory, or at least doing inventory within one's own system. Inspect the part, check it off the list, pick up the next one. One, and two, and three, start over.

He built Raph a bike so his brother could get away from him faster and leave him alone, which he most certainly did. Don reflected that it may not have been his logical reasoning at the time… really, he just thought it would make Raph like him more. Raph liked him before the bike. He left him alone to do his experiments, called him brainiac, came to him for advice. They talked about bikes and cars.

Then Leo left, of course. Really, if he allowed his brain to float on hapless waves of supposition, he could blame Leo for this. If Leo never left, he never would have thought there was anything wrong with Raph.

Carburetor No. 4A. Check.

"_Raph, get out here and have breakfast with us."_

"_Mmrf."_

"_Raph—I mean it. Are you sick or something? You've been holed up in your room the whole week."_

"_G'way, Don."_

"_If you're upset about Leo leaving, we can"—_

"_Don, fer chrissakes, when the hell you become Leo, huh? Leeme the fuck alone. I'll be out in a few."_

"_Sleeping all day is a sign of serious depression, Raphael. Lack of appetite, heavy sleeping patterns, intense alienation, lack of physical activity—it all points in one direction."_

"_I'm fuckin' warning you, bro"—_

"_Raph, I mean it—get out here. You think I'm joking?"_

"Yer_ a fuckin' joke. I'll be out when I feel like it."_

"_Raphael! I—I mean…"_

"_Spit it out, leader boy, before ya put me ta sleep."_

"_I'm telling you"—_

"_An' I'm tellin' _you, _get the hell away from my door!"_

"_RAPHAEL!"_

"_WHAT?"_

"_Get. Out. Here. Th—THAT'S AN ORDER."_

Carburetor No. 5B. Check.

"_Ah, there's Sleeping Beauty. Sorry to say your prince hasn't come home yet."_

"_Mrrf."_

"_Sorry, Raph, afraid I don't speak Neanderthal."_

"_I don' speak Morning Person, asshole."_

"_It's two in the afternoon, Raphael."_

"_Yeah—woke up early jus' fer you. Don't say I never did nothin' for ya."_

"_Beg pardon?"_

"_What, ya mean Mythbusters ain't on at three?"_

"_Oh—OH. Right. Oh. Umm… I… guess—theresstillcoffee."_

"_Huh?"_

"_Ahem… I said there's still coffee. If you want some."_

"_Heh… thanks. Don't usually drink the stuff. Makes ya piss a lot, ya know. Doesn't seem healthy."_

"_Shall I feed you carrots and oatmeal from a feed bag today then, health freak?"_

"_Yer the one who needs carrots—yer vision goin' out? No other reason someone'd wear those goddamn stupid-lookin' goggles."_

"_Form must meet function, Raph—and fashion has no place in that equation."_

"_My bike meets function just fine. An' it looks fuckin' cool as hell."_

"_Oh—didn't you tell me you needed a new carburetor? I've got a part that'll fit—you know where I keep the B parts?"_

"_Naw, I found one. Thanks."_

"_You… you're sure it's the right part? Need me to look at it?"_

"_Nope—already in the bike. Workin' great."_

"_Oh. Well. Tell me if it acts up again. I've seen some of your shoddy patch jobs."_

"_Kuh, yeah. Whatever."_

The B parts were always specifically for the bike he'd built for Raphael. Since Don had messed with the bike significantly from the original machine he'd salvaged, they were rather specific parts—the idea that Raph could find duplicates and quick-fixes confused him. He'd stopped coming to him for the B parts, but he still had questions about bike difficulties—questions that, back then, Don believed that bike shouldn't have trouble with, and it baffled him. His inventory had always been impeccable. The B parts remained on the shelf for months and months—too long for Raph to be riding that bike in his normal fashion and never need any replacements.

Then a D part disappeared—spares he'd picked up in salvage for other machines. A muffler that could fit a Harley if calibrated correctly, and it was then, from such a strange yet simple piece of evidence, that Don traced quick-fire mental corridors, and at the end, found the Nightwatcher.

The first time in his life he'd ever felt hatred for a brother. He sat dumbly at his desk staring at a fuzzy picture of that Nightwatcher bike, black and silver and hulking, beautiful in the moonlight. Raph's cover—Don would know the shell cycle any day.

Carburetor 6B. Missing.

"_Yo."_

"_Well, good morning, sunshine. Ready for training?"_

"_You're gonna pay for this stupid last minute shit you pulled on me, Don."_

"_I'm free to call a morning practice session any time I see fit, little brother."_

"_Yeah, well, some advance warnin'd be… ya know. Grown-up a' you."_

"_I'm sorry, grown-up? Grown-ups wake up at decent hours and don't stay out all night like some rebel without a cause. Grown-ups take care of responsibilities without being asked. You want me to treat you like a grown-up, Raphael? Get a job."_

"_Got a job. Damn important one too."_

"_Oh really? Then you won't mind showing me twenty bucks for groceries this week, I suppose?"_

"_Ain't been eatin' none a' the groceries. You seen me eat a crumb in this place fer awhile?"_

"_Fine, then—labor costs for making the electricity operate would be nice. Or for the water heater so you could take showers."_

"_I helped you build that shit fer one. Two, I do some a' the plumbin' myself—so I ain't payin' ya fer that. Three, I ain't needed a light switch fer a long time. I ain't been watchin' TV. So I don't owe yer money-grubbin' ass a dime."_

"_Splinter is your father too"—_

"_Then he'll ask me to get a different job. 'Til then, Don, get the hell outta my business! I'm getting' tired a' this shit. I'm not some goddamn kid, an' even if I was, I sure's hell ain't doin' what YOU say. Master Splinter tells me what ta do—not you."_

"_Oh please, you're such a petulant child"—_

"_Fuck you!"_

"_Oh yeah—that's the answer to everything, fuck you. Probably because you haven't got enough brains in that prehistoric raptor head of yours to formulate an intelligent response. Why don't you go up top and club yourself a couple rats and drag them back to your cave for dinner?"_

"_Oh—Oh yeah? Fine. FINE."_

"_Still haven't got something better to say?"_

"_FUCK YOU WITH A FUCKING SANDPAPER-LINED TWO-BY-FOUR, YOU KNOW-IT-ALL LITTLE TWAT!"_

"_Now THAT was creative! Let me write that one down. I'm sure it'd make a great hillbilly bumper sticker! You might be worth billions after all—or at least a nice dinner at the Chick-Fil-A!" _

Rage indescribable. He'd had dreams of chasing the Nightwatcher, closing his hands around his neck, throttling his brother for making him be the responsible one—the helmet would clatter away, and he'd see Leo dead from malaria in the jungle, Mikey caught out in the open while he did his Cowabunga Carl gigs and his face dissected, a portion of brain matter showing. He would dream-blink and it was only Raphael, black and blue beneath his hands, and suddenly, he was alone. The leather-clad figure up ahead would be running again, and he'd jump back into the hamster wheel, pursuing to nowhere.

Truth be told, he was afraid of the Nightwatcher, afraid of him sitting so close behind Raphael's eyes, back then when he started noticing it—the restless violence swarming under amber rings that glowed unnaturally like a predator. He was afraid of being wrong and accusing his brother falsely of something heinous. Casey would know. Casey would tell them.

Also a lie.

So he denied the evidence, waiting for hard, cold proof, something that would snap him out of the reverie, something that would make all justifications tear away like flimsy cobwebs obscuring the vision. Honestly, he didn't want to believe it himself—he'd rather justify, rather find ways out, than think Raph would forsake the family, let him and Mike work dead-end jobs, while he was out risking his life and playing vigilante hero, like he was Batman funded from the rich Wayne fortune—money they didn't have and never would. Hatred would spark in him again. The way he had to bitch, nag and plead with Raph just to do dishes… Yet he would swallow back bile at the very idea of a physical confrontation. Every day, the muscles lining his brother's neck bulged and grew, veins burst out and made their outlines plainly known, lines of thick, hard flesh ribbed his shoulders, flexed with the slightest motion—his brother's eyes flicked about the lair whenever he showed his face, with the apprehension of predator, or of constant prey. Raphael was hunted by something in the shadows, and while he searched the dark night for criminals, in himself lurked another monster, and each moment, each punk that he broke down or rammed against fifty trashcans on his ride, he grew closer to an invisible line. Maybe Don was just waiting for Raph to tell him.

He was a good big brother, wasn't he? Raph liked him. He'd stayed out of his business all those years, and they repaired pipes and wiring together in companionable silence. Don supposed when he thought about it that Raph would never have come to him about this—there was nothing under that silence, no real understanding of one another, just the ability to blithely to respect one another's boundaries and get along so long as they each were useful. And they had been—brain and brawn, after all. Upset that useful balance and they despised one another, and there was nothing to soften the abrasiveness. And so resentment and misunderstandings turn inward as well.

Don found himself staring at the list uncomprehending. A problem with Raph was also a problem with himself. Raphael was dead, and left a hole in his brother's heart, an empty place in his soul he'd always kept in reserve, so Raph would one day fill it—the moment they got around to being close. They never did.

One final moment to prove they were brothers—one final act of true understanding to make up for it all, and his brother's spirit was calling out to him through this list, through these once mundane and arbitrary occurrences. There was no longer anything mundane or arbitrary about this.

More inventory, and B parts missing across the board. No one but himself knew a thing about motorcycles in this family now, or knew what were the necessary parts, and these had been here before. He ran a hand over the list, the missing B part slots, as though it were his brother's hand.

"Raph."

--

Clouds of dust settled once more in the vague stagnancy of the garage, revealing that familiar, bright red bike over which Don and Raph had spent many a day fixing and tuning and pondering, and which now stood in pieces, ignored, even forgotten. Hands which knew considerably less about motorcycle repair now ran an inquisitive, pondering trail over the parts, reaching into crevices, cleaning with a hitherto unknown affection, fondling the tailpipe and gently brushing down the seat. It stood, a broken monument to potential, a relationship built and torn-down so it could be built again, bettered slightly with every break, a deep rumble and reassurance, and now—silence.

The garage was dark. The figure ignored lights which no longer had electricity running to them, and struck a match. Fire flickered now with a loving caress over the crimson paint job, illuminated dust moats. Light up the darkness. Some things cannot be fixed.

--

"Leonardo—this is your second day in a row. Do you wish for me to step in for a few hours, my son?"

Leo was indeed on his second straight day, having only received small reprieves from Mike and his father—but each "reprieve" he had received reluctantly. His father had believed at first that perhaps the novelty would wear away once he had been with his disabled brother long enough—but as time wore on, he came to wonder if Leonardo did not truly derive some enjoyment out of it. He did not get frustrated, and Raphael was undoubtedly acting differently too—his fits were short, controlled quickly, not only by Leonardo, but by Raphael himself, from within.

Leo looked up from the pile of dry alphabet noodles he and Raph were sorting through on the kitchen table, and smiled.

"No thanks, Master Splinter. We're just fine—huh, Raph?"

Raphael was meanwhile pulling all the T shapes out of the pile obsessively, until he found Leo's hand over his.

"Got a T word in mind?"

Raph blinked and looked up at his brother, slightly imploring, as though he were searching for what he needed to tell him.

"Leo, t-taech me dis wahd, plaise?"

Leo smiled. "Alright. It's a T word. Got any other letters in mind?"

Raph frowned, focusing inward, as though—trying to remember a word he'd once known, and knew he wanted to relearn. He gazed back at the pile, staring and sorting with one big finger, until finally settling on a D.

"Dis one."

Leo nodded, and pulled a T and a D towards himself.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

Raph shook his head thoughtfully. "Leo, issa wahd dat does tings."

"Okay, a verb then."

Raph watched him avidly, then mimicked: "Vahb."

Leo met his eyes with a smile. "Exactly. So… a verb starting with a T, and it's got a D in it. Can you tell me what this verb does, Raph?"

Raph sat thoughtfully for a time, investigating this and searching his head for the right string of words.

"Ii's about you, Leo. Laik… whan a pahson has… ting, an' gives to anodah person wis a ting. An'… da same back."

Leo tried not to be surprised or befuddled by this rather verbose description, and looked back down at the letter noodles. Slowly, he grabbed an A, and Raph nodded encouragingly, as though he'd known this all along. Before Leo could spell the word, Raph had supplied it already, almost making his brother's heart jump out.

"T'ade! Tade! Dat one! I know dat wahd, Leo."

T.

R.

A.

D.

E.

Leo nodded dumbly, keeping his smile up, though the information was spilling over in a kind of white rush of excitement. He hadn't re-taught Raph the word "trade" at all, and had never heard him use it. It was possible that he'd picked it up from daily life too, but he even remembered the spelling—which told him that, more likely than not, Raph was calling it from memory.

Raph matched his excitement, but a moment later remembered his purpose.

"Tade, Leo—wanna tade."

"You wanna trade something? What do you have in mind?"

A sudden embarrassed look stole over Raph's face, almost shame.

"Wanna… I wanna…" he was striving to make this a good sentence, and it showed. "I want to t'ade… Dohnay, Leo."

Now concern was on Leo's face, and he could no longer hide it. "Huh? Trade Donnie—for what?"

Raph went stone quiet now, staring at the noodles with a frozen face.

"Raph… look at me," Leo implored, finally maneuvering enough to put himself in Raph's line of vision, and succeeding in making the connection. "Tell what you're thinking of, and I can help you."

Raph nodded; his face was somehow heavy with something, brimming with words that he fought to pull out.

"Dohnay h-hates may."

It was Leo's turn to freeze up. "Hate" was a word he had consciously never re-taught Raphael, never used around him… but then, he didn't have control over all the words his brother heard or understood. He'd learned "hate" from Donnie—and learned with acuity what it meant. He felt a shudder ripple over him, at the very vision of Raphael, now so innocent and trusting, understanding hate, and believing with so much conviction that Donatello hated him. But Raph knew emotions on his brother's faces, and as visible upset stole into Leo's features, Raph was the one to comfort _him_, rather than the other way around.

"Reo, I'b sohry," his younger brother said, now with a thick, imploring voice.

Leo got a grip over himself as Raph's big paw came out and clasped his shoulder.

"It's not your fault…" He sighed. "So… you want to trade Don out, do you?" He took a breath. "That's why you've been behaving so perfectly with me." He squinted slightly. "Don really doesn't give you enough credit for how smart you still are."

Raph gazed into his eyes, and in them Leo caught a spark of something that was brighter than he'd seen in a long, long time.

"I'm… b-broke, Reo—but I'b… still m-may."

Leo felt tears coming and didn't stop them. He wanted Raph to know that words like this meant something to him—more than he could say. He knew who Raph wanted to trade Don for and felt his heart tearing in two—there was only one way to make Raph understand why he couldn't, and that was to tell him the truth, to confide in his brother, as he once had, like an adult and an equal. But as he gazed into his brother's eyes, he also knew that he couldn't discount what had been asked of him and why.

"Raph… please be honest with me—try to tell me what Don's been doing when I'm gone."

And there it was, Raph's old aversion to snitching rising up and retracting his gaze from Leo. But his brother would not be derailed.

"He hits you, sometimes. When he's frustrated. Maybe without meaning to. You're… you're a lot stronger than maybe you realize, Raph. He _does_ want what's best for you."

Now Raphael frowned at him, making Leo think that maybe he'd gotten something wrong.

"Was that time I saw the only time?"

Still silence, neither denying nor confirming. Raph wouldn't tell him—but he'd let him think what he wanted, even the worst.

Leo leaned back slightly. "You want me to take you on faith here, Raph?" Truth. Raph needed the truth. "Mike's out getting into deep trouble. You see how he needs me too?"

Raph's expression turned thoughtful, as his brows knitted together, and he searched for a response.

"I kehn… come wis you?"

Leo was able to smile once more. "I wish you could."

A frown, before Raphael suddenly looked down at his hands, then his arms, where his muscles had softened from thick flexing cords to something hidden, unless he tried to show them. Here Raphael looked away from Leo, appearing frustrated.

"Maikay is… huht?"

Leo swallowed. "In a way. This has been hard on him. You understand? It's not your fault, though, Raph—it's just… something that happened. Alright?"

Raph began shaking his head back and forth, forcefully, until Leo reached out to make him stop.

"Noh true, Reo—no! No no no no… D-Dohnay… Dohnay an' may… no no no no!" He'd started shaking his head once more, his hands desperately gripping the table edge, when Leo reached up and took hold of both sides of his head, and brought their faces within an inch of one another.

"Raph… Raph, look at me. I don't want you to hurt yourself. You're doing so well—don't try to find someone to blame this on. It happened and it's happening and blaming someone won't do _anything_ to solve it."

Raph stared, trying to digest this.

"Reo… noh mad at may?"

"No, I'm not mad—I love you, I just want you here! That's all I want. I don't want someone to blame, I don't even want some magic cure, I don't want to risk you again, and I don't want to lose you. Okay?"

Raphael was silent, neurons firing behind eyes, digesting, digesting, taking in those words and trying to see what could be made of them. Finally, numbly, he nodded, and Leo hugged him to his plastron, against a storm looming outside of himself—one which he couldn't stop, predict, or control, but which would build regardless. Fear sparked in his soul.

But that was the big brother in him.

--

Long into the night he labored, by the light of candles; the garage was taking on the aura of a long-abandoned shrine, where the ghosts were coming back to take up residence now that food for their souls was being left back out for offering.

Somewhere out in the darkness a shot was fired, and he closed his eyes. Something there in the darkness, another string of golden light, pulled him forward hopelessly, to fix those things which will never find repair. He had walked a road like this once already in his life; he had also run from it with eyes squeezed shut. When things are not right, we can only fight fruitlessly with battering, hopeless hands against the invisible foe, until darkness subsumes us.

_There is no cure for this._

_Bruises._

_I'm broken._

_He's not coming back._

_He wouldn't want this._

_You don't know what he would want._

_You're enjoying this._

_What do you know about what I want?_

_I'm broken._

_Bruises._

_There is no cure for this._

There's got to be a way out.

T-R-A-D-E.

--

Leo finally got to bed at three in the morning, long after he'd put Raphael to sleep with story books. Mike still had not returned.

He bundled further in under the blanket on his futon; now freshly showered, the bedding smelled only of himself, a hundred times over—himself now, himself then, himself a life ago, on the other side of the cataclysm of time.

He heard the soft padding from the door, and stayed still so Raph could think he was asleep, but smiled slightly; when he sensed his brother sitting quietly by his futon with a tentative waiting stance, he finally stirred and touched Raph's arm gently.

"Everything okay?"

He could feel Raph trembling under his hand, and out of the darkness he heard small whimpering noises, but his brother couldn't seem to answer him with words; he sat up at that, moving to light a candle beside his bed, but Raphael gleaned it and stopped him, with an insistent, fearful sound in his throat. He had to remind himself that Raph was still _Raph_ on some level—he didn't want to be discovered coming to Leo because he was afraid.

"Bad dream?" Leo ventured. If Raph did remember—and he suspected that he could remember some—he might be having flashbacks. After all, brain damage doesn't make us blithely unable to experience and remember the trauma that gave it to us, all while taking away some of our ability to rationalize it off. After a moment's processing, Raphael nodded his head, and Leo pulled his arm experimentally. Walls his brother had once had were weaker now; inhibitions once held and pride once cherished above all else were destabilized considerably, concepts of memory, which came and went. "Come on—you can sleep in here."

Processing—or perhaps just hesitation. Maybe too much time was going by—maybe even Leo was failing to see this new person as entirely Raph anymore. He couldn't deny liking any of this any longer. He'd finally managed to separate the two—wish for Raph to return and mourn his loss, all while finding himself liking this new Raph, and what he gained from it. And he did indeed gain something, didn't he? Slowly, Raphael got under the covers, clinging tightly to him, uncannily like a child who'd had a bad dream, harmless, innocuous, still trembling like a leaf buffeted by cold winds. Briefly Leo became aware than his hand was still on Raph's arm, stroking slightly at skin that was now much softer than his own, no longer exposed to rigorous training or the rough surfaces of the wide, concrete cityscape. It all puzzled him—new expressions on his brother's face, and those new sensations, his brother's skin suddenly fresh and childlike, perplexing, as though he had to keep relearning him, reintroducing, and in it always those disturbing flashes of Raphael, his brother gone, to somewhere deep in those eyes, waiting to come out when they let him.

Leo closed his eyes to black out all light that might find its way into his room from the hallway, to make the illusion more real, his hand passing over Raphael's face—and there, found at last the familiarity—one as old as his childhood, as familiar as his own… soft slopes and curves, the landscape of memory, a mouth which once tensed in anger and rebellion, now smoothed in a strange innocence. Raphael was the restless type, still afraid and confused from whatever dream he'd had, moving his legs and tangling them with his brother's in Leonardo's small futon, and making Leo shift several times to get comfortable. It was rather like being children again, in some ways—Raph had once taken over the bed constantly when he was younger, and his muscles seemed to remember it, as his mind did not. Raphael mirrored Leo's earlier motion hesitantly, a hand on his brother's arm, grasping at him silently in an island of fear, and feeling him as though Leo was to him as familiar as an old toy—and indeed, he was. Leo became conscious that he might be one of the few things that sparked true memory in his brother, that he might be an object of anchor, that his voice, his face, his skin, the undulations of his words, were all a safe place for him, merely because Raph had heard them so many times in his life, and they had been then something commanding and reassuring. Never mind that he'd once rebelled, had once spurned, had once sulked, because of his elder brother—they'd created a string of light between them, a thousand connections, a network, and now when Raphael's mind was afloat, it was to Leo he looked to make some of it seem sensical.

Raph's trembling persisted, so Leo hugged him closer. He imagined that for a few hours at least he could protect him, so perhaps someday he could be Raphael again—or whomever he wanted to be, whomever he _could_ be. But he would be there, and that's what was important—wasn't it? Don and Mike didn't understand. They had to bide time, be patient, and someday things would be right again. What was so bad about Raph now?—he was likeable, after all, and loving, and sweet, and often very happy. They could be glad for that, they could be thankful, they could live and enjoy what they had instead of wishing for more. Leo couldn't deny he wanted Raph back, of course… but that didn't stop him from loving this one. This brother. This new person, newer everyday. But he was falling into that trap, palpably, and unable to pull himself back—he knew Raphael wasn't a child, and yet on occasion he was very content with thinking of him like one, and in that thinking was a dangerous, gray blind-spot, becoming more and more apparent. Yet he could not take his hand from his face, or loosen that arm around his shoulders, or loose the sense of warm breath tickling his neck, which told him he was alive, that reminded him of the corporeality of that body, that same body, which was still with him, which meant his brother was _not_ dead, and _not_ some senseless creature, and _not_ some ghost of his former self. Raphael was an anchor to Leo as well—most equations work in both directions. Something about holding on felt good, in an almost corporeal way—something about holding on felt _too_ good.

Raph was squirming to get free of his embrace, but he still held on for a few seconds longer, before letting go. He could feel his brother's eyes in the darkness, over the pillow, and something thick in the air between them, besides his brother's confusion.

No matter which way he spun it, Raphael was not a child—he was twenty and had the body of someone nearing their prime. He was not small, or physically helpless, or utterly unaware and guileless. The thickness of it was suffocating Leo, and his breath came out bedraggled, and formed magnets under his flesh, and too many things were becoming obvious far too quickly. Damage the brain, but some things do not vanish.

Pheromones.

Leo grasped Raphael's shoulder, still feeling his trembling, and the ragged breath, while they both lingered in utter confusion.

"Oh god…" Leo muttered, getting a grip on himself. "I'm sorry, Raph—I'm sorry. You're a big boy, I'm sorry—you gotta go back to your room now, okay?"

A moment of processing, before he felt Raphael nodding dumbly with his cheek against the pillow.

"Noh… noh mad ah may, Leo?" he gasped out, backing up onto the floor. Leo could hear embarrassment in his choked voice.

Leo grasped his hand gently. "No—No, of course not. It was… s-stupid of me. Go back to bed, okay? I'm not mad at you."

Slow nodding in the dark, and the sound of light padding, back to his own room, and then—silence.

Leo clenched his fist over his forehead for a moment, eyes tight shut, fighting off waves of disgust as the thickness in the air dissipating, leaving him cold and clammy, nauseated and shaking. He wanted to tear his skin off, to punch a wall, to do something with the massive shame, guilt, and revulsion rising under his flesh in revolting waves. He rolled over at last, with a sleepless mind. _Never again_.

--

_You're enjoying this._

The phantasm sat on his haunches before the bike, which gleamed red, black and silver chrome, flickering orange behind a mountain of candlelight.

It was now, at long last, an operating, fully-restored shrine, to a soul whole and bright.

Leo threw the wrench and cleaning rag aside with a clatter and a thump, resting his hands on his knees as he knelt. He sat bathed in firelight, guttering, quick to spark and quick to die, and acknowledged the grief which had been welling within him. He closed his eyes, resting a hand now on the seat of the motorcycle—this piece of his brother unchanged, untainted by anything but time, sitting here alone, waiting for Raphael to come and fix it as he'd planned. Marks left behind, traces and dents on the earth and on his brothers, which failed to fade, which failed to vanish, which failed to vacate the hole left in their hearts.

Another gunshot, and the string pulled on his chest ever tighter. It meant Mike, out there somewhere, following the shots like hellhounds on a trail of blood, his brother in the darkness.

T.

R.

A.

D

E.

To Mike, or to Raph? To save the scrap of one brother before he faded to nothing, lost in shadow, or nurture the scrap of another, feed the hungry embers as they struggled to burn back into life again?

He knew Don hated him through all of this, and it was sorely tempting not to feel the same back. He refused to be as messed up by this as his brothers, to forebear in the way Raphael seemed capable. He turned his thoughts away from notions of fairness. Soon a shrine would have to be erected in the honor of his father, and he would push through it, and jump to the other side of those cataclysms without a glance back—because that was his place. It was for others to wallow, to wish, to dream, to wistfully wish, to look up through grills at eternal sunshine, to ponder how green the grass was on the other side. Look forward. Light up the darkness.

There is always a way out.


	7. Go round and round

Author's Note: This chapter is a bit shorter, but props to everyone who read it before it went in. Sorry about the huge delay between my last update and this one--I was in England in between. Enjoy! Also, if anyone wishes to hear the song Splinter is humming, you can find it online after a google search of Japanese children's songs, and it is typically called Carp Windsocks or the like.

--

Nothing.

Donatello had lived a charmed life; his was an innovative mind, forever sparking, and like the grave it had suddenly fallen cold, muffled, and damp. No seeds took hold in that stony ground, far from light, even as he lost himself in bleach fumes and Orange Glo and Pine Sol, while dust particles lit up under rays of diaphanous light.

Nothing.

No ideas. No brain blasts, no sudden revelations, no blinding miracles, no hint, no clue, no god, no meaning. No way out.

"Doh-nay?"

And then there was that.

He didn't respond with words, only turned to gaze at the big, lumpy form of his younger brother, standing awkwardly in the door—but it seemed he didn't have much other than awkward these days, did he?

"Leo sed dat… he wuz gonna get Maikay, an' yooh'n may ah gonna hang out till he comes back. Kay?"

It was a well-executed sentence—he had to give Leo's teaching skills some credit. So good, in fact, that Don entertained the notion of having something close to a conversation with this new brother he was now stuck with…. Again.

"Oh? And how long has Mike been gone? Do you know?"

Raphael pawed at his head slightly, as though scratching an itch he couldn't reach.

"Sense… yestahday, Dohnay. Dunno da taime. Sohry."

Don shrugged. "It's fine… I didn't need specifics. Mike's trying to be a big boy. Maybe he should go pay rent to April and Casey if he doesn't want to play family anymore."

"Pray?"

"If you're asking, Raph, no, I'm not going to play right now. This lab is still ten shades of filthy."

But Raphael stood silent, and Don could swear his brother was considering him.

"I don wan Maikay ta leave, Dohnay."

Don didn't watch himself for once. "He might as well leave, for all the help he is around here."

"B-but… he's Maikay." There was something in that voice he was missing, and frustrated, Don snapped.

'What d'you know about Mikey, anyways? You probably barely remember him!"

Silence; a swallow.

"Y-yooh don' know, Dohnay."

Don gazed at him, making an effort to quiet his voice, more interested now.

"Don't know what?"

But it seemed this was a revelation to Raphael, and he was unable to travel beyond it and elaborate it just yet.

"Yooh don't know!" And with this last, cryptic and rather forceful statement, Raphael slid the lab doors shut again and was out of Donatello's sight.

Now it was Leonardo's turn to chase the darkness until his bones ached, but he could reflect that at least he knew the darkness was there. As he pursued his younger brother over the rooftop roads of nightmare, he couldn't help but turn his thoughts back to what he had left. He had earlier stopped before Donatello's door, hand frozen as to knock, and tell him what had occurred the previous night, and ask him how it was possible. But he already knew the answer to that. He had quite simply been too free with Raphael, as though his sibling were truly a child or a pet to be fondled, and in this way he was guilty of just the same abuse as Donatello—only, in a rather insidious fashion, his abuse was softer, more loving, and harder to spot. A damaged mind in a twenty-year-old body does not stop telling the body to produce pheromones simply because it has trouble stringing sentences together; the only answer was that he had outright confused Raphael, when he drifted lazily over that line between parent and something that defied description. He had never intended it that way—but none of that prevented him from dry heaving when he awoke, and the images flew back before his mind's eye. He was aware that Mikey had become his excuse, to take him away from the brother he wanted to be with the most. It was very possible that he and Raphael had simply spent too much time exclusively in each other's presence, and a break would help them immensely.

But he did know, as he leapt from roof to roof, searching for a brother who didn't care to be found, this wasn't where he wanted to be. His imagination sought back to Raphael and Donatello beneath the streets, far below him, and for the first time he knew that he had willingly left his brothers in danger.

A gunshot in the distance. Run faster towards an invisible doom.

Raphael was for once sitting alone in the living room while his father slowly puttered about in the kitchen, preparing tea and a glass of milk for his son, and he'd felt that he could trust Raph to stay in front of his letter shapes with the comforting sound of the TV, Splinter's soaps on commercial break. It was a pleasant, quiet scene of home life, going on while Donatello remained sequestered indefinitely in his lab—the sound of the front door closing intruded in upon this scene, and Leonardo all but fell down the stairs into the den. He appeared, stumbling, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, unsteady on feet once utterly and completely sure of themselves, limbs aquiver and eyes dull; he smelled coppery with the metallic scent of human blood.

The speed with which Raphael rose to help his brother was impressive for him and his current state of reaction; instead of crumpling, Leo found himself half-propped up by the softened, but still-strong arms of his younger brother. Dazed, he managed to keep his smile, trying not to alert Raphael to anything wrong, protecting him from ill news almost by instinctive default.

"Hey, Raph? Didja have a good day?"

The slur was not lost upon Raphael; his stutter returned in full force.

"R-Reo? A-ah yooh akay?"

"I think… I need to lay down. Okay?"

"Reo?"

Leo's eyes seemed to droop; Splinter's voice sounded from the kitchen.

"Is that you, my son? Is Michelangelo with you?"

For the first time in their lives, Splinter did not instinctively seem to know something was wrong; he continued puttering, humming a little Japanese children's song under his breath he once sang to them as children.

"Yane yori takai koi no bori,

Ookii magoi wa otousan

Chiisai higoi wa kodo madachi

Omoshiroi sou ni oyoi deru…"

Carp windsocks are above the roof

And the biggest carp is dad…

The little carp are his kids

And they like swimming in the sky.

He continued blissfully onward, unaware of blood spurting from Leonardo's arm, unaware of Raphael stuttering as he haltingly guided his brother to the sofa, and of only they, his damaged sons, aware in the world of the sticky black flowing out with every heartbeat and the panicked look younger gave to older—his lifeline.

"Reo?"

Leo stumbled onto the couch, gazing at a very lost and frightened Raphael, keeping eye contact. He could not, dared not, raise his voice to alert Splinter, and Raph was far too lost to do so himself. Leo did not wish to alarm his father, nor Raphael anymore than he had already, and made a beckoning gesture.

"Raph… who do you think I need?"

A blink, a lost expression, searching, and then the click.

"Dohnay prays da do'ter. Reo, ah'll get hem, kay?"

Leo smiled a bit. "Good idea, Raph."

Raphael was off like a light as Leo gazed around now, in the middle of this surreal home, a strange simulacrum to the lair of former days, holding a tattered couch cushion to his arm for lack of something better. The TV continued blaring, soap operas back from commercial, and his eyes blearily turned to it with the kind of apathy of a café patron watching a couple walk down the street. It seemed Blake was being brought back to life by a crazy old woman to take back his twice-divorced wife and mother of his piano prodigy daughter. Interesting. Don't fall asleep. Don't close your eyes. Splinter continued on in the kitchen, the kettle singing along with him in a sprightly, high-pitched harmony.

Carp windsocks are above the roof

And the biggest carp is dad…

The little carp are his kids

And they like swimming in the sky…

As Raphael had just left him, Donatello was hardly expecting to refill his idiot quota for at least a few more hours—so when Raph burst in on him, he turned with an expression none-too-encouraging, especially for a brother whose stutter seemed to be having a truly nasty reoccurance.

"D-D-Dohnay—yooh n-n-naaaed ta… ta…. R-Reo ehs… ehs… naaaed ta… D-D-D"—

Don lost patience by the third sputter, thumping down his rag and screwdrivers with a clatter.

"Need to what, Raphael?"

"R-R-Reo…"

"Whatever it is, have Leo do it for you. You like him better than me anyways." Don turned to continue what he'd been doing, scowling at the interruption. To his very profound surprise, Raphael paced forward, and he looked at him fully for the first time. His eyes were wider than Don had ever seen them, over-bright with a glowing, thick layer of tears threatening to spill over, and a kind of trapped desperation, of a person locked within a too-small box for weeks, beamed out at him, so that Donatello was finally alarmed with him.

"Dohnay, Reo! Reo!" He said the word over and over, as though attempting to attach a second, more important meaning to the word, and down in some deep place where his family and hope and someone younger still lived, Don finally got it.

"Leo."

"Reo!" Like a broken record, but at last he understood.

"Leo's hurt."

A moment, and Raphael clicked with him, beginning to nod profusely, relief flooding his eyes.

Don swallowed, keeping his cool—some deep instinct, the part of him that was a doctor, detached but concerned, even altruistic, snapped into gear, and he refused to panic. He grabbed some supplies. He froze his face impassively. He strode past Raphael, listening to the great creature huffing and heaving as though he might hyperventilate, and stayed utterly calm.

"Reo… Reo…. Reo…"

"He'll be fine. Let's go."

Splinter had finished making his tea and had begun pouring milk when he found Donatello pushing Raph into a seat at the kitchen table, then grabbing the remainder of the hot water Splinter had made from the stove.

"Keep him in here, will you?" Don asked quickly, before disappearing to the couch. Splinter watched his second youngest, who had immediately tried to rise from his chair the moment Don had left him.

"Reo—n-naaed ta"—

"I've got him, Raphael!" Don called back to him—without malice, without conflict, only authority, swift and strong, medical box swinging in one hand and tea kettle in the other. Splinter placed milk before Raph, smiling benignly, swimming in a dream of early fatherhood.

"I hear it is good for your bones, my son. Let us see how your spelling is coming along."

Raphael stood staring for a moment, looking between father and glass of milk, blinking tears from his eyes mutely. After some moments he sat with a heavy thump like a weight dropped from someone's shoulders, and stared into the white, chalky stillness of milk before him. The same strange, otherworldly feeling that had overcome Leo now, in a stifled sense, washed over him in his clouded mind. Again he looked from milk to father, from father to milk, watching Splinter sit across from him, not the least bit alarmed, humming under his breath.

"Yane yori takai koi no bori,

Ookii magoi wa otousan

Chiisai higoi wa kodo madachi

Omoshiroi sou ni oyoi deru…"

Raphael stared for a great long while, as a word glittered and swam about in his brain, glinting in the light like a great fish. He wanted to say it, unsure as to why. He needed to say it, and wasn't sure for whom.

"C-caaaahp?"

Then he glanced at the couch, some itch in his brain soothed, and another reemerging. When he glanced back, letter stickers had magically appeared before him, and Splinter calmly drank his tea. Unthinking, unable to think of anything else in fact, Raphael spelled out the most wonderful word in the entire world.

"Dohnay es gonna maeke hem bettah," he said over them, as though they were a magical talisman.

Splinter looked up at him, smiling as though surprised.

"Your sentences are very good, Raphael. Leonardo should be proud of his teaching skills."

Raphael seemed to stare at him, fathomlessly.

"Dah… ah yooh… ahkay?"

Velevety fur under Splinter's old eyes crinkled with his smile, as though he could not possibly be happier.

"I am very well, my son. Thank you for asking."

Raphael blinked, absorbing this; at last he glanced down at the word he had spelled, as though displeased with it. He added five more letters, at last thinking it to be complete, and swallowed back his panic.

L.

E.

O.

N.

A.

R.

D.

O.

It was far less serious than he'd been tempted to believe, but with the amount of blood produced, Donatello couldn't be surprised that Raphael had been so shaken up. A gunshot wound, which had hit Leonardo along the curve of his tricep, glanced slightly left, and drove a tear through the round of flesh before continuing on. He stitched the wound shut after a cleaning, vowing to come back and repair the torn muscle under a more surgical environment and higher pain medication than the small dose of liquid acetaminophen he administered. When the wound was wrapped and a sling created to keep Leo from lifting the arm and further damaging the muscle, when only a small ooze of blood and clear plasma made their way to the gauze, Don sat back with a small huff. Leo squinted at him, still gripping the ruined pillow he'd used to stop the blood.

"Is Raph okay? I think… think I really scared him."

Don set about packing some of his stitching instruments and supplies back into the medical box, busying himself so Leo could not see his drawn, strange face.

"He'll live. So—you ran into some gangsters and got too slow to avoid a shot, huh? No back-up from Mike, I take it?" His voice was edged, clearly fishing in a guarded fashion. Leonardo took him off-guard, however, by scowling at him.

"Gangsters. I wish. That might be embarrassing, but at least it'd be simple. You've got no clue what's happening up there anymore, Don, so don't pretend like you know."

Whatever this ill-will meant, Donatello recovered from it quickly.

"Well. You danced around that Michelangelo question pretty neatly this time, didn't you, big brother?"

Nonchalantly, as though reaching to pat him encouragingly on the arm, Don put his hand out and pressed, precisely and forcefully, down on Leonardo's wound. His brother kicked out suddenly, taken completely by surprise, and by the time he tried to move back, Don had already retracted the hand.

"AH—Jesus, Don!"

Donatello drew close to Leo's face, menacingly. "Where—is—MIKEY?"

Leo was spitting with anger by now. "What do I look like, a GPS monitor? I'm injured and stuck down here, how the hell would I know?"

Don made as to touch the injury again, only missing it as Leo lanced away.

"Where was he when you last saw him, smart aleck?"

Leo shrugged noncommittally. "I don't know… I followed them forever, seems like. A warehouse near the Midtown tunnel, I think. Why, what the hell are you going to do?"

Don smiled sarcastically. "You're right, Leo. I haven't been up top in a good while—time for a stretch and some fresh air for me!" He made as to stand, but Leo grabbed him hurriedly with his good arm, his face one of sheer panic.

"Don't!"

Don's smile was cold, reserved, slightly willing to be cruel. "Why, big brother—your concern warms the cockles of my heart."

"Stop it, Don, and listen to me! We need you down here. You're supposed to be… to be…"

"Curing the uncurable? Solving the unsolvable? Saving the unsavable? What do I look like, Leo, some Evangelical healer? Some things can't be done. I'd rather save someone I've got some chance with."

Leo stared, dropping the hand dully with his mouth sitting slightly open. Once recovered, he looked away, face tight and drawn, mouth a thin line.

"You've got no clue what you're talking about, Don. It makes… makes me pity you. It really does."

"Stop being a martyr, Leo," Don spat. "It's making me ill. Now you can tell me what Mike is up to or I can find out for myself, how's that for you?"

"Don't threaten me."

Don would not be deterred. "What, is he some kind of masked Turtle Titan for real now? Is he wandering around with Batman and Superman and the Green Lantern and this gunshot wound was just a small distraction from the ultimate takeover of planet Earth by Zod? Or has he gone to the dark side and started selling drugs, and shot you when you discovered his cartel?"

Leo laughed a bit emptily. "Mike isn't a drug dealer, Don. Or a titan."

Don's sarcasm flitted off, replaced only by those shrewd brown eyes.

"But he did shoot you."

Leo turned away, half-disgusted and half-resigned, eyes lingering apathetically on the wandering soap opera characters. Donna left Ricky at the altar. Lance revealed that he had cancer before the shocked bridesmaids. Danielle fainted and was caught by the priest.

"Just go away, Don."

A shadow flitted over him; he glanced up, and found Don striding out, towards his lab, and relaxed. All under control again. Breathe in. Breathe out.

"R-Reo?"

And smile.

"Hey, Raph. I'm glad you got Don so quick. He was a great doctor." Leo indicated his arm. "See? All fixed up."

Raphael was gazing down at him, a small milk smear on the side of his anxiously working mouth which seemed to be grappling with his tongue, trying to comprehend what had been happening, before he sat on the edge of the couch.

"Dohnay prayed da do'ter, Reo? Yooh gon' be ahkay now?"

Leo nodded, unable to keep the real, warm smile from replacing the stock calming smile of before.

"Yep—sure am, Raph."

"Yooh—yooh prohmise may?"

Leo reached over and took his brother's hand.

"Yeah, Raph—I promise. And you know what? I'm not going to the surface anymore. I'm staying down here—with you. You get your trade, okay?"

Raphael blinked several times, digesting.

"Maikay?"

Leo's eyes flickered with a disturbed, restless anger.

"What about him?"

"Ded Maikay go… ta pray?"

Leo squinted one eye quizzically at his brother.

"To pay? Pay what?"

"Dohnay sed dat… dat… Maikay go ta pray."

Leo watched him for a moment, trying to glean a meaning from this. Damn Donnie confusing Raphael more than helping him.

"Don't worry, Raph—Mikey doesn't have to pay anywhere. This is his home. He just needs to come back to it."

A moment to process, and Raphael nodded, seeming satisfied. Then another idea, or perhaps a remembrance, glowed like an illuminated light bulb out of his eyes as he snapped up.

"L-Leo… Dah es… funnay. Isn' he?"

Leo watched his brother seriously for some time—this was one of the most lucid observances he'd heard out of Raphael thus far.

"Maybe… what makes you say so?"

Raphael shrugged, perhaps unnerved. "Sez da tame—s-same t-t-tings."

Leonardo squeezed his hands, forcing their eyes to connect.

"You try not to worry, okay? He's happy. I'll be here too. Promise."


	8. London Bridge is falling down

As I lay me down to pray…

As I lay me down to pray…

Leo hadn't been to the dojo to do anything other than exercise his body in quite a long time; now, however, with his body out of commission, and his mind spinning out of control—with one brother missing, one brother not himself, and the last potentially going round the bend, he supposed that now was the time to stop neglecting his spiritual side. The dojo was clean, but another kind of cobweb seemed to have taken up residence—once a strange static of young energy, constantly spiraling into a pirouette of motion, danced about the room with an electric crackle of short-term memory; and like Raphael's mind, that memory had faded, some gone altogether, while only the most important ones remained. Leo couldn't help but feel that it was his own mind that attributed special meaning and memory to the dark corners of the room, and sometimes that might have been what was happening with Raphael—he read into him and imbued him with those special qualities that once gave him life in an unreachable past. Perhaps there was nothing special about the room at all anymore.

As he closed his eyes, though, Raphael's face it was now flitted before his vision. Raphael smiling, Raphael spelling words with a simple grin, reaching out to put soap on Leo's face, Raphael sorting letter noodles, looking quizzically at Michelangelo passing, as though sightless, through the den past him; Raphael pawing at Don for attention and flinching under rebuke, or smiling quizzically when hearing a joke he could not—perhaps would not—understand. He tried in vain to conjure up the vision of an older Raph—a Raph disconsolately glaring at him over cereal bowls, a Raph fixing the cable with Don and quipping jokes, a Raph watching Donnie work on the security system and occasionally asking him questions about the hook-ups for pointers, a Raph with cameras and tools in his hands to help his brother, a Raph shouting that Don's stupid Tech mag was in from the PO box, a Raph rolling his eyes as Mikey popped in with a Kiss the Chef apron, a Raph smeared with grease after fixing up bikes in the afternoon, a Raph racing bikes or skateboards with Mike and exchanging macho challenges to one another, a Raph with a rakish grin, with a glint in the eye full of danger and darkness and recklessness—a Raph arguing with him as though fighting for his life, a Raph raging against Shredder, roaring into battle against Foot ninjas, a Raph picking his teeth with one long sai blade to show off for the enemies, a Raph eating an apple in the middle of a battle while getting his revenge… a million flitting ghosts like so many spiders and shadows, cleaned from the dojo and imagined into corners, phantoms beamed into a dusty brain. Maybe the dusty brain was his own.

Raph had become a ghost to him.

_As I lay me down to pray_…

He forced his thoughts back on track, back to praying for something good, anything good, to happen for them—for something to follow his brother other than himself—for a bodhisattva, an angel, a guardian spirit, a totem, to fall from a heaven he had to convince himself still existed, to protect Michelangelo, to save Donatello, to look after the Raphael whom had fallen into some kind of indiscernible void. Where did people go—where were their souls, the sparks that made them real, when they continued to live on with new personalities, with diminished abilities? Were they only half-dead? He could have let Raph go if he'd been shot, lost in battle. There was a veil there, tangible, that would separate his brother and himself—cold flesh, stiff features, still breath. He could believe his brother nearby, watching over him. Instead his love had to transform, and inevitably defy, betray, the person his brother had once been. But then who was the judge, who the audience, that condemned him for it? He wandered in a cardboard, story-book world with an amused, sadistic author, no escape but death or waking up. And still he opened his eyes, and the altar was before him. Forsaken, allies vanished into air and forgetfulness.

A gunshot echoed in his mind.

There is always a way out.

"_Don, have you considered actually talking this out with the family?"_

"_It doesn't concern you, Leo. It's between myself and Raph—and it's a simple enough procedure. He'll be fine after a few days and much better for it."_

"_It's __not__ just between you, Don! Everything you do concerns the entire family"—_

"_You're such a controlling bastard sometimes, it makes me sick."_

"_Excuse me?"_

"_You don't want Raph and I doing this without your approval, your input, your permission"—_

"_I'm not saying you need my permission, Don—but I do think I oughta be at least included"—_

"_No! You shouldn't! It's got nothing to do with you! Raph's brain, my know-how—no great shining fearless leader Leonardo in that equation! So butt out!"_

"_Don"—_

"_I said no, Leo. Take it up with Raph. This was his decision. At least I respect it. What, you think he's a kid?"_

Don had cooked and re-cooked this conversation between his ears a million times over—sometimes the words changed, the outcome became different as his over-active imagination, through the scrub-scrub and swish-swish of near-silent cleaning noises, went to work on the lines to alter their meaning, to make it all somehow not true. He wanted to go back to that moment, be the Good Doctor and tell Raphael he needed to sit down with the family and talk it all over, to hear the pros and cons from Leo and Mike and Splinter and April and Casey and whoever-the-fuck-else wanted in. Then when the shit hit the fan after all this, they would all be just as responsible as himself—well, almost. He owned the lion's share. It was still _his_ burden—the fuck-up ultimately belonged to him. He couldn't deny that piece of shitpie. But at least he could pull them in with him.

But no. He hadn't wanted to hear a single word against the procedure from those who knew nothing about neurology or those who many have stupid, groundless or superstitious fears. So seldom did he and Raph have a "thing." So seldom did they get to have a moment with one another. So seldom did Raphael come to him and say, honestly and clearly, "I have a problem and you're the only one who can help me." The _only_ one. It meant something to Donatello. It meant Raph wasn't coming to him to be the mechanic or the tech, to work on objects and petty desires. It meant he could truly alter his brother's life, health, and prospects. It meant he could be fabulously praised, eternally thanked—not just the geeky mechanic. This was something more, a miracle, turning water to wine, turning RAPH into someone livable, normal, balanced.

If succeeding meant all those things, failing was failure forever.

No going back, except by scraping the experiment and pretending it never existed. And the experiment was none other than his dear, stupid brother.

He stared at the compilation of parts on his cleaned and sanitized table, awaiting organization. There was no magic in these odds and ends that could bring to him the one thing he needed, the one tool that could reverse this entire mess, the one miracle that would make all the difference.

Renet.

He'd wished in vain for magic, for utroms, for Triceratons, for the fugitoid, for any of the great technologies and powers that he'd encountered in his lifetime by accident and had treated with almost blithe disrespect, to come when he really needed them. Great powers only seemed to appear when he and his brothers were required, yet never the other way around. They had friends when the universe wanted them to help around the house, and when _they_ needed it, the stars and courses of magic that ran around them seemed suddenly and wretchedly silent. And Renet, who had been of all those people and races to them a friend, had utterly forgotten them. Not a word, not a whisper, as though Raphael meant nothing in the great scheme after all. Only when he was helpful to her. To time. To… whatever.

A crack met Don's ears; he looked down to see a microchip turned to silicon fragments between clenched fingers as he'd stared off into space. He'd once seen small cities and amazing potential in these little chips. Now he truly knew how fragile they were… even though he should have known all along. Logic, after all. Perhaps even he had known an element of youthful invincibility.

"_Hey—Mike caught a fish for dinner again. Think he's getting pretty good."_

"_Oh… awesome. I'll be right over, sweetie—gotta finish up these stupid knots. Leo showed me but, like, it's just too complicated, you know? Taking me forever!"_

"_Leo's knots are always more complicated than they need to me—here, let me help you. Jeez, what'd you do to this one, Renet?"_

"_I dunno, almost got my hand stuck in that one. Kinda gave up."_

"_Uh… I'm gonna just untie it and show you a shortcut, okay?"_

"_Wow! Thanks! Couldn't you just… like… do it for me? Please?"_

"_Heh, you'll never learn how to survive out here if I did that, Renet."_

"_Oh, Donnie—such a good boy. Good thing you're cute."_

"_Um… heh. There. Untied. Now, hold it in your hands like this"—_

"_Like this?"_

"_No, like—no—okay, actually watch me, alright?"_

"_Oh, like this?"_

"_Okay, now you're just doing it on purpose."_

"_Heehee, am not."_

"_Think you got it?"_

"_Um… can you show me again? I like watching you."_

"_Uh, sure… see how I looped it like this? You try."_

"_But you're so good with your hands, Donnie!"_

"_Oh jeez—I was supposed to get you to come help with dinner. We should go."_

"_Such a good boy."_

"_Look, Renet… uh. We should… um. Get back to camp."_

"_Okay!"_

"_Don't sound too heartbroken."_

"_Oh, we'll be stuck here a long time, sweetie. Aren't you glad we're friends? We ARE friends, right?"_

"_Uh, yeah. Of course, Renet."_

"_Good. It's so nice of you to help me out… even though it totally, like, ruined you guys' lives and stuff. You're not mad at me, right?"_

"_Let's not get into that."_

Friends.

Only when it worked for Renet, of course.

"_Don—Leo tried talkin' to me about this again"—_

"_So? What does he know about brain chemistry?"_

"_It ain't that, Don—listen ta me, I just wanna know—what the heck __is__ the worst case scenario here? I mean, I'm not too sure I really know what it is you're doin'."_

"_Ah… well, it's a little hard to explain. Basically I'm going to trick your brain into altering your brain chemistry permanently. It's a lot of equations for the most part."_

"_You didn't answer my question."_

"_Raph—with the nanobot technology I made from the utroms, a lot of the potential risks will be kept to a minimum. Try not to worry too much, alright? If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of all the potential variables, there's an almost limitless number of things that could go wrong. Like any mission on the surface, or driving a car. It's a very noninvasive procedure there, so I guess… you know, you'll have to trust that I know what it is I'm doing."_

"… _yeah. I never said I didn't trust ya, bro. You know that. I just… kinda wanted to know what it was I was gettin' myself into."_

"_I think, no matter how it goes—even if it doesn't have as big an affect as I wanted it to—it'll have a huge influence on your quality of life. Definitely for the better."_

"_You're the doctor man, Donnie."_

"Doh-nay?"

Shit.

_Bang_.

Don't reverie was rudely interrupted as he pulled his head upward from under the workbench where he'd been stacking his tools and bumped it on the upper surface with a sharp crack on the back of his skull.

"Ah! Damn it!" He allowed himself to curse a bit, with the same modicum of restraint as he would have around inanimate objects and nothing more, before turning to Raphael, who now stood in his doorway, shifting nervously from left foot to right. "What is it? Leo okay?"

"H-he's… ahkay. Dohnay?"

"_What_? I'm working on something, alright?"

"E's… Dah, Doh-nay. Sohry." Hesitant and obviously afraid of his brother's reaction, Raphael now shifted his way as to make it out of the door without further disturbance. Making an exasperated sound, Don stepped forward with an arm out.

"Wait? What about Master Splinter? I don't know how to help if you don't tell me the problem."

A moment's processing as Raphael turned back to him, his eyes staring almost blankly with struggle for a moment, before that click occurred.

"Dah—f-fah-gotted hes med-sine, Doh-nay."

"He forgot to take it?" Don clarified, knowing Raph had troubles being clear. As expected, Raphael shook his head, not yet frustrated.

"L-Leo s-stohped hem, Doh-nay. T-t-two taimes."

Don had to take a moment himself before understanding—Leo had had to stop Splinter from retaking the medicine. He made a much more sincere sound of exasperation.

"Well, why the heck'd he send _you_?"

As though hearing the disdain in his voice, Raph blinked a few times and clammed up—as though refusing to cooperate further—and shrugged noncommittally. Impossible. Don swung out past him and grabbed his arm as he passed.

"Well, come on. I can't leave you alone in my lab."

Raphael pulled back slightly and Don let him go, glancing back—however, Raphael continued to walk dutifully, only throwing off the hand that dragged him, as though he wanted to come alone. Donatello felt himself swallow back something odd gathering inside him, eyes slightly widening, before hurriedly turning away and hiding the disgust which lanced up on his face in familiar defense. He hated it far more when this fake Raphael showed teasing signs of his dead brother, as though mocking his grief and his failure, as though entirely on purpose—planned, vindictive, a demon in his own home dogging his heels in sadistic punishment.

"Leo!"

"In the kitchen, Don! What's took you so long?"

"Well, I couldn't get what—are you _doing_?"

Leonardo was, in fact, surrounded by what tools he himself knew how to use—namely screws and an electric screwdriver—and installing on the medicine cabinet in the kitchen a padlock, while Splinter hummed peacefully away over his tea.

"My son, your playing is so loud," Splinter said gently, taking a sip and spotting Raphael coming in ahead of Don. "Ah, Raphael—be kind to an old rat's ears and encourage Leonardo to play with you outside."

Leo ignored his father. "Raph—hand me another screw, yeah?"

Raphael looked between them with very confused eyes, working his mouth silently, until moving past his father with a slight pat of his clumsy, pawing hand.

"Sohry, Dah—ahmos d-done, ahkay?"

Don remained in the opening to the kitchen, stunned by what he was seeing—suddenly he felt like the one out of the loop entirely, while Leonardo had taken complete charge of the scene before him. And while this was precisely what he'd wanted, he found himself folding his arms, swallowing back gall. Too little too late.

"You wanted to see me, fearless brother of mine?" Sarcasm oozed from his voice uninhibited. "Seems like you've got everything pretty much under control."

"Two things, Don," Leo said, turning from the cabinet while Raphael played with the screws in his hand with interest, a tongue between his teeth. "Firstly, we'll be hanging the key to the medicine cabinet in my room, and partitioning the pills into daily doses in clearly-marked groups for the day, date, and time, so there's no confusion."

"Completely flawless approach," Don commented coolly, with his doctor's voice—detached. "And the second thing?"

"What are you doing in your lab, Don?" Leo's voice was blunt, accusatory.

Donatello stared at him, silent in defiance, and so Leonardo sighed, continuing on.

"Tomorrow night, I know Mike will be meeting someone at a particular location. I'm going to give you mission parameters and an address, Don. I need you to bring him back—by force if necessary. I can't do it now. And I won't be leaving Raphael with you again."

Don frowned. "Again? In what time period?"

"As in… _ever_ again, Don."

Whatever reaction Donatello felt, he kept it well away from his face. "Is that all you want with me?" Not waiting for an answer, he'd already turned to go back to his lab.

"That's it? You don't want to know why? No fight at all? Won't even defend yourself?"

Don laughed derisively. "Why bother? I've got what I want. You can keep your slobbering troglodyte. Marry him for all I care. And even if I _wanted_ to defend myself, you'll always believe a drooling child over me any"—

"_Donatello_!"

It wasn't Leo that spoke—but a voice that struck a wave of frission through the kitchen. Three pairs of eyes turned to Master Splinter, who had stood, staring hard at his second oldest, appearing far more together than he had mere moments before.

Don looked like his heart had stopped. "Father…" he whispered, but got no further.

"You will not speak of your brother in such a manner! It shames us all!"

Don didn't even realize there was moisture in his eyes—only that the room had grown strangely cloudy and difficult to make out.

"He isn't—isn't"—

A small clatter, like glass breaking, filled the silence of Don's unfinished sentence as Raphael flung his hands up to his ears, dropping the screws to the ground with little clatters.

"Isn't." It was all Don could say, directly at Raphael, as though finally understanding what the words meant to him.

"Why does he hurt so if he is not your brother?" Splinter asked him, maintaining the authority in his voice. Leo's eyes were covered by a hand, and he stood very still beside Raphael, placing the skin of their shoulders in close contact.

"B-because… he's just enough like my brother… to make me have hope—to torture me a little longer. This is nothing but punishment, Father. He's an object of Raph's revenge." Don could hear his own voice, realized from the cool part of his mind that he sounded deranged, and for once in his life had to watch it go on, unable to stop the vehicle from careening out of control.

Raphael's face was scrunched up. He could still hear every word.

"My son…" Splinter's voice was oddly gentle, somehow broken.

At last Leo had taken his hand down from his eyes, and they burned into Donatello—the way they must have burrowed into the depths of his enemies like cursed torches.

"You're going to burn in the seven hells for this, Donatello. Not for that stupid experiment. Just for _this_."

"THIS _IS _HELL, LEO!"

He couldn't see the room clearly anymore in between blinks, passing a hand distractedly in front of his eyes, and swung around, trying to find a way out.

"Doh-nay."

And stopped.

"Why do you have to torture me?" Don's voice was a plea, but he felt sick at the sight of Raphael—attempting to speak, pawing away a small line of drool, and staring suddenly at it with something almost like horror. Raphael's eyes dodged, panicked, up at him—trapped like an animal, he seemed, desperate and unable to speak.

"Doh-nay."

Leo and Splinter both watched the exchange, as though waiting for Raphael to finally speak for himself, for something within the depths of him to shine through the damage.

"What do you _want_ from me?" Don asked the apparition, shakily, and it tapped distractedly at its temples with both hands.

"Doh-nay…" And those pleading eyes, suddenly like his own.

"H-hep… may."

_Help me._

"_Donnie… I don't want to be like this anymore."_

"_What are you saying, Raph?"_

"_I'm saying… I… Help me, Don."_

"I can't help you," Don said, backing away slightly. "I couldn't help you. I shouldn't've helped you. No one can help you—no one _wants_ to help you. Everyone is so silent now. It's all over, Raph. Can't be reversed. Apparently…" he was speaking now, not to the living body, but to some ghost printed on the inside of his own eyeballs. "You don't matter. Everyone seems to think that as long as you're alive, there's no one to grieve. It's unreasonable to think you're gone. No reason to have a funeral. No reason to make a difference between what you left behind and what you _were_. But not me. Not Mike. We won't… Don't ever think that we'll… stop… stop…"

"Stop it," Leo whispered, clenching the counter behind him. Splinter had sat down at the table, diminished once again, as though sapped of his strength. Raphael was watching and listening to Donatello, spellbound.

"No one acknowledges the grief," Don continued. "That's why the ghost is still here."

"Stop it, stop it, stop it…"

"Punishing us for forgetting you."

"_STOP IT!" _Leonardo exploded in a burst of energy, all his limbs flying at once save the damaged arm. "How DARE you?! He's standing right here, Don! _This_ is Raph! Look at him! Listen to him! He hasn't gone anywhere! HE'S RIGHT FUCKING HERE!"

"_That_ isn't Raph."

It felt so unbelievably good to say it, to let the words leave his mouth before everyone present, a great burden off his shoulders. Leo looked ready to cry in frustration.

"How could you do this?"

Don shrugged, suddenly filled with an odd peace—more peace, in fact, than he'd felt in many months. "I haven't done anything wrong, Leo. It's just the truth. Acknowledge your grief—you'll be at peace, and eventually so will he. And then there'll be no more revenge."

"You've lost your goddamn mind."

Don laughed outright. "No crazier than you've become, fondling that… that _poltergeist_ like a newborn kitten—you make me ill."

Leo had flinched eerily at the word _fondle_, eyes faraway and disturbed, but Don didn't follow it up. He didn't care what Leo did with it, as long as he helped him to make it go away.

"You'll retrieve Michelangelo tonight, Donatello," Leo said, after a short pause; his voice had grown reticent, cold and commanding—safe ground. "After which you'll get back here and back to your lab. _Not_ to clean—am I in any way unclear on this, Don?"

Don scoffed. "You'll order me to fix the unfixable? You can't unbreak glass, Leo. You can't unstir soup. You can't undead our brother. And neither can I."

Leo finally snarled. "We're done talking about this, Donatello. If you can't keep a civil tongue in your head, I'll have to"—

"What, cut it out for me? Is that Mike's new job? Sounds useful."

"Get OUT of this kitchen, Don!" Leo looked about ready to froth at the mouth and tear his belligerent brother to pieces.

Raphael's hands had notably gone up around his ears, and as though to drown out the sound for him, Splinter had begun humming gently under his breath—Raph seemed to focus on it, face scrunched up and closed.

"Or else what?" Don's voice was low, purring, dangerous. "You've got nothing to offer me, Leonardo. Nothing to scare me with, nothing to take away. You're nothing now but a small, impotent, deluded babysitter in love with a slobbering child. I've already lost everything you could ever take from me, and you try to tell me I've gained. You're like a sand dune in the distance that tricks everyone into thinking it's a mountain, and the only one impressed with you is that drooling, psychopathic"—

A small scrapping of chairs disturbed Don's diatribe, and a blur of green and blue overtook his vision. Leo expected that the dive bombing and a shift punch to the face would have sobered, even scared his brother; unexpectedly, however, when he pulled away he found Donatello laughing his head off, a small smear of blood on his front teeth and lip like a grotesque kiss mark.

"Now…" Don gasped, grinning wildly as though it were his first Christmas, "You're acting like a man who's lost a brother."

Leo grasped Donatello's windpipe with his bad arm, relishing the pain as it lanced through him, and leaned down on the limb to inflict pressure on the fragile trachea.

"Shut up…" he menaced, closing his eyes for a moment but unable to follow any steps to calm himself. "Can't you ever shut up?"

"Don't you just want to _hit something_, though? What else is there to do, Leo?" Don rasped, still grinning at him, meeting Santa Claus for the first time ever. "Doesn't it make the itch in your brain go away?"

"You did this," Leo whispered, not entirely speaking to Don, a person possessed. Don still grinned, but he met his brother's eyes.

"I did this."

A crackle of communication appeared to pass between their eyes in the near-silent kitchen, with only Splinter's humming setting the tune in the background. Koi fish, windsocks, Boy's Day, childhood and the kitchen, two boys tussling on the floor.

"Raphael, your brothers play too loudly. Take them to the dojo with you if they have too much energy, my son."

A wave of cold water seemed to hit Leo and Don in their positions, and all the energy went out of Leonardo's threatening gesture—sitting atop Donatello weak and impotent, as Raphael walked up behind them, wondering if they'd indeed been fighting, or if it had all been an illusion.

"R-Reo? Don' huht Doh-nay, plaise."

It was such a together, non-panicked and simple request, as though Raph were trying to be matter-of-fact or even ironic. Leo blinked up at him, sitting back on his heels, and felt Don get out from under him with notable dignity.

"Give me the address and whatever other info you've got before seven, Leo," Don breathed, sounding suddenly too tired to raise his voice. "I'll be in my lab."

"And what are you doing before seven?" Leo asked, curiosity piquing his voice slightly.

"Practice run. I haven't been out in forever, remember?"

Leo seemed ready to protest, but Raphael interrupted his thought.

"Doh-nay—g-ghosh."

Don appeared confused, glancing at Leonardo, but Splinter spoke again from the table.

"Have your brothers been frightening you with tales of ghosts again, my son? You should not listen to them." He sipped his tea then, with his velvety fur crinkling in his old smile. "There are more dangerous things in the world."


End file.
